After WWII, my grandpa and dad decided that our world would likely survive another century and they ordered a tractor.
For several years after the war, a farmer often had to wait several months after ordering a tractor before it arrived. That’s because there was a shortage of both steel for manufacturing anything, and rubber for making tires. Many farmers made the same decision to upgrade from horse-drawn equipment to tractor power.
Near the end of the war, my dad had decided to convert an old Chevrolet car into a makeshift tractor on steel wheels with an AutoTrac kit that he bought in Shawville from the Otaco dealer. The AutoTrac served us well and could pull an old two furrow gang plow that used to take three horses to pull.
After waiting five months for the new Cockshutt 70 to arrive, a little gray Fordson came in instead with no word that the Cockshutt was even on the assembly line. They settled for the little 20 horsepower Fordson and found the rubber-tired Fordson a much smoother ride than that homemade steel wheeled AutoTrac. It even came with a two furrow hydraulic plow.
It was a formidable task to tackle cropping 90 or 100 acres with that little Fordson, but unlike using the team of horses you didn’t have to stop to give the little Fordson its wind.
Soon Shawville had five machine dealers for farmers to choose equipment from. The Cockshutt dealer often used local school boys to drive new tractors home from the plant in Smith Falls, Ont. The Massy-Harris dealer got his combines from the plant in Brantford, Ont., but their tractors were made in Racine, Wisconsin. Both John Deere and International manufactured their tractors in the US corn belt. The first offshore tractors sold in Shawville were the dark blue, British-made Fordson Majors.
Last week, I visited a local repair shop where there were three different colours of tractors in for both minor tune ups and major repairs. Although they were all well known North American brands they were all manufactured in either South America or Europe. Parts for some of these tractors can be a challenge to get.
One tractor with a familiar name in Canada was manufactured in Italy and had a German-made fuel pump. The fuel pump parts manual was printed in Italian and luckily part numbers are the same in all languages.
Most of my mechanic friends agree that machinery that was made in North America is easy to work on. One of my best mechanic friends once said, “foreign tractors must be put together by folks with small hands because Canadian men have trouble repairing them and getting their hands to reach into many tight places.”
Most modern farm equipment is highly computerised and although some companies make their software available so most mechanics can do repairs, some companies only make this information available to their own dealerships. If that dealer is too busy to fix your tractor for a couple weeks in the middle of cropping, walking past that hundred thousand dollar broken down tractor for days on end can be very detrimental to a farmer’s mental health.
Before a person goes to look for a car or truck it might be a good idea to visit a car insurance company to investigate which vehicles are the least expensive to insure. Before a farmer goes looking for a new tractor it might be a good idea to talk to your mechanic to investigate the reliability of some different tractors!
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
