TRACTOR TRIVIA and other interesting stuff 5/31/2024

[953 nut 55,229]

When did tractors replace the horse?

 

The number of draft horses and mules utilized for farming peaked at just over 25 million animals around 1910, 17 million in the great planes states alone. About that same time, the number of tractors began rising and peaked at just under 5 million in the late 60s and 70s. The turning point when the amount of tractor power overtook the amount of horse power on American farms was 1945.

With the increasing amount of farmland made available through the homestead act large steam traction engines were used to break the ground. However, horsepower remained the primary force for planting, cultivation and harvesting. Each steam traction engine required several horses to pull wagon loads of wood to fuel them and water to replenish the boiler. The first gasoline powered tractors were also very large and though they no longer required teams of horses to pull tenders they weren’t useful for planting and cultivation at the time.

Smaller eastern farms didn’t benefit from early tractor designs due to their size. It wasn’t until the smaller general-purpose tractors were introduce in the late teens that horseless farming became a reality for them.

Each gasoline powered tractor freed up about thirty acres needed to feed six horses on the average 160-acre farm allowing more cash crops to be grown or a larger heard of dairy cattle to be raised. Altogether tractors allowed sixty to seventy million acres of productive farm land to be added by the 1920s.

Also, the labor force needed for farming was reduced from 13.5 million people in 1910 to 4.2 million in 1973 while the average farm size increased from 138 to 385 acres. This allowed many people to work in the newly founded industrial companies that were springing up everywhere.

According to the Economic History Association's 1955 estimate, the U.S. would have been almost ten percent poorer in the absence of the farm tractor. The tractor has had a markedly positive economic impact. Horses and mules, while providing farm power, ate up more than twenty percent of the food they helped farmers grow!

 

This excerpt from a 1923 Australian newspaper sums up the transition from horses to tractors very well.

Considerable interest is being evinced by farmers on Yorke Peninsula. and elsewhere, on the question of mechanical versos horse power for the efficient and economical cultivation of the land. It is becoming more generally recognized that the tractor of today is not an experiment, but holds out possibilities of not only doing the work much 'cheaper but of getting it done quickly in its season, taking full advantage of weather conditions and giving the farmer more leisure and time to attend to other matters. The fact of farmers succeeding in the past with horses is all very well in its way, but up to a few years ago business generally was working more slowly, and everything was in rhyme with the times. Today, the great industrial machine of the world has been accelerated, and as each industry works in conjunction with the other—each forming a link/ as it were, in a great chain—so, for success, all must work together. Ther is no doubt, so far as farming is concerned, that the tractor is going to reduce the working cost of cultivation and harvesting considerably, and help in other ways to get a move on and succeed in keeping up with other industries.

Each gasoline powered tractor freed up about thirty acres needed to feed six horses on the average 160-acre farm allowing more cash crops to be grown or a larger heard of dairy cattle to be raised. Altogether tractors allowed sixty to seventy million acres of productive farm land to be added by the 1920s.

Also, the labor force needed for farming was reduced from 13.5 million people in 1910 to 4.2 million in 1973 while the average farm size increased from 138 to 385 acres. This allowed many people to work in the newly founded industrial companies that were springing up everywhere.

[rjg854 11,362]

This has all been so interesting and amazing the progress that was made in a relatively short period of time.  

[Achto 27,577]

"Get rid of that hay burner and get your self a Wheel Horse". A little something that I like to tell my real horse owning friends.

[Handy Don 12,232]

4 hours ago, 953 nut said:

This allowed many people to work in the newly founded industrial companies that were springing up everywhere.

Among those industries were agricultural equipment manufacturers!

Noting too, that the farm size didn’t say constant with the tractor giving the farmer more free time. No, the farm size grew (and the workforce shrunk) so that fewer, now-more-efficient farmers worked more land.

One wonders what happened to the horses.

Edited May 31 by Handy Don

[Beap52 811]

I've never stopped to consider how much land was needed in order to feed the mules and horses for farm operations.  I also didn't consider that teams were needed to fuel the early  steam engines with wood and water. 

 

Mom who was born in 1935,  was saying the other day that before her dad updated to a tractor in the 1940's, that it was her job to bring in the team to the barn or for her dad.  She said she would walk barefooted to catch Doc and Dolly.  One of the horses would allow her to climb on and ride back home. 

[953 nut 55,229]

On 5/31/2024 at 11:00 AM, Handy Don said:

One wonders what happened to the horses.

Sort of a two part answer to that question.

1)  If there is less demand for horses people stop breeding horses because it would cost them money to have too large a herd.

2)  During World War One a tremendous amount of horses were shipped to Europe to pull supply wagons and weapons, at the war's end they were left behind for the European people to use in rebuilding their economy.