Business: Tractor Boom

Under a Binghamton, N. Y. dateline last week United Press reported that local farmers were “shaking their heads in amazement” over a “mechanical contraption that plants and cultivates small garden crops.” Apparently one of two things was true: 1) the farmers around Binghamton are a backward lot or 2) the U.P. dispatch was a gross exaggeration. The “mechanical contraption” was merely a modern tractor with a modern line of seeding and cultivating attachments—a McCormick-Deering made by International Harvester.

At the moment there is plenty of excitement in tractors but not in mechanical innovations. Basically the tractor has changed far less in the last decade than its first cousin, the automobile. The two principal developments in late years have been the swing from steel rims topneumatic tires and the rise of the “all-purpose” models. All-purpose simply means that the tractor can pull and plow and in addition can be used in cultivation, being built high enough to clear growing crops and with a wheel tread adjustable to varying row widths. Almost two-thirds of all wheel-type tractors sold today are all-purpose.

Total tractor sales in the U. S. last year were some 200,000 divided between wheel-type (173,000), track-laying type (26,000) and garden-type (5,900). Great exponent of the track-laying tractor is big Caterpillar, which is both pleased and annoyed that its trade name has long been applied by the public to all track-laying tractors. Garden tractors, popular with truck gardeners and amateur farmers, are little units of 5 h.p. or less, generally driven on foot like small power lawn mowers.

For all practical purposes it is impossible to segregate tractors from the farm equipment industry. Most tractors are made by farm equipment companies, most farm equipment companies make tractors. Tractor sales usually run about 40% of total farm equipment volume. And this year the farm equipment volume is expected to near if not equal the 1929 peak of nearly $600,000,000.

A good indication of the trend of the tractor-farm equipment business was furnished last week by Milwaukee’s Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co., which is outranked only by General Electric and Westinghouse in electrical equipment and only by International Harvester and Deere & Co. in farm equipment. Allis-Chalmers’ Chairman Otto Herbert Falk announced that his salesmen booked more orders in the first six months of 1937 than during all twelve months of 1929—$53,000,000 as against $31,000,000 in the first half of last year. Profits for the six months were $4,142,000, compared to $2,089,000 in the first half of 1936.

Nearly two-thirds of Allis-Chalmers’ volume is provided by farmers. It initiated with notable success the baby combine for small grain growers, now offered by all its big competitors. Chairman Falk, no farmer except for goats (TIME, Oct. 28, 1935), had demonstrated in the past few years that farm equipment is a perennially young industry with plenty of opportunity for late starters.

The big undeveloped farm market is the small farm from 50 to 100 acres. It is this market that the farm tool makers are now trying to develop. The key to it is an efficient tractor priced at substantially less than $500, a machine which no manufacturer has yet been able to make at a profit, though experimentation is continuous. The low-priced field at present is around $600. Even Henry Ford, though he still thinks tractors cost too much, gave up trying to reduce prices, the Fordson now being made in Ireland.

Latest entry in the fa?t tractor field is Sears, Roebuck & Co. Made by Graham-Paige Motors Corp. the mail-order tractor is named Graham-Bradley after the Brothers Graham, Joseph (President) andRobert (Executive Vice President) and Sears’ Bradley line of farm tools. Priced around $1,100, placed on sale last fortnight, the tractor will be sold and serviced through Sears retail stores and agencies.

The Graham-Bradley is far from the first Graham tractor ever built. The Grahams have farmed the same land in Indiana since great-great-grandfather Ziba Foote Graham got it from the Government about the time of the War of 1812. In the late 1880s another Ziba Foote Graham, father of the motor-making brothers, invented a gigantic steam tractor but found it so hard to steer that he never tried to manufacture it. In 1917 they built another tractor but droppedmanufacturing plans when the Fordson tractor rolled into the farm market. The third Graham tractor was all set for production when Depression knocked the bottom out of farm machinery.

Though reported to be considering a mail-order tractor, Montgomery Ward & Co. still handles only tractor parts and a set of gadgets by which a resourceful farmer can turn his old Ford into a tractor.