Tractor—Green Edition: The Heartland Innovation, Ground-Breaking Machines, Midnight Schemes, Secret Garages, and Farmyard Geniuses that Mechanized Agriculture
Tractor—Green Edition: The Heartland Innovation, Ground-Breaking Machines, Midnight Schemes, Secret Garages, and Farmyard Geniuses that Mechanized Agriculture
ITEM 243AP
By Lee Klancher
This rollicking ride into machine history follows the innovators, entrepreneurs, and hucksters who transformed our world with farm machines. Starting with the turn-of-the-century visionaries who saw that four wheels and a motor could replace the horse, the book moves swiftly through key early developments to cover the power farming movement of the latter part of the 20th Century—a time when major manufacturers lagged behind and independent builders and farmers began creating their own solutions with a pencil drawing and a welder.
The book includes stories of the butcher shop where John Deere secretly designed a completely new line of four and six-cylinder tractors, to the skullduggery and corporate raiding that took place in fields and back lots as company agents schemed to discover what their dirty ol’ competitors had up their sleeves. The book moves all the way up through the creation of the first tractor electronics, the merger movement of the 1980s, and the emergence of the high-technology innovations such as smart farms and auto-guidance which are changing the farm as we know it. This raucous, heartfelt book shines a light on some of the bright minds and innovative companies which emerged from the fertile fields of America’s heartland.
Hdbd. 240 pgs.
Tractor, the story of the mechanization of agriculture, is intriguingly subtitled The Heartland Innovation, Ground-Breaking Machines, Midnight Schemes, Secret Garages, and Farmyard Geniuses that Mechanized Agriculture. The book’s 12 chronologically based sections begin with The First Tractors: 1889–1906 and conclude with Epilogue: The Future of the Tractor. The profusely illustrated award-winning hardcover book includes color photographs taken by the author plus color and black-and-white photographs, advertisements, and sales literature illustrations from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Smithsonian, as well as private collections. The book’s 161 vignettes focus on a particular tractor to tell its story in a unique and interesting way. For example, among the 26 vignettes in The Dawn of Power Farming 1970–1979 section, three cover the final Minneapolis-Moline, the last Oliver, and the White Farm Equipment Field Boss, which was part of the line that replaced them both. In addition, the book includes 24 brief historical accounts that cover such topics as The Plow Maker—John Deere, The First World War, actor James Dean in The Star and the Farm, and The Great Tractor War. The book’s engaging format encourages reading topics of interest without regard to chronological order, if desired.
Book Review by Robert Gabrick
