The tractor and its influence upon the agricultural implement industry

Foreword

THIS IS, we believe, the first complete story of that vast business, the manufacture and sale of agricultural implements and farm tractors. It first appeared serially in The Country Gentleman.

To the business farmer, implements and machinery are of primary importance. It was as a part of its service to the progressive farmer that The Country Gentleman undertook the task of gathering and presenting this material.

The Country Gentleman is pecu- Harly the publication of the business farmer. It is national, it is weekly, it covers the entire country. It touches on all crops and all agricultural topics, and always from the point of view of the man who farms to get back out of the land more than he puts into it.

Within the past year there have been two developments which have made it more important than ever that all the facts about this implement industry be brought together and given thorough consideration.

One is the rapid development of the farm tractor, which is having considerable effect upon methods of manufacturing and selling all implements.

The other is the increased agitation for shorter retail credits, a reform which would have far-reaching effect upon the implement dealer and the service which he renders to the farmer.

It has been the purpose of The Country Gentleman to treat these vital topics in such way as to assist toward a wider and more economical distribution of farm machinery.

THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Philadelphia, June, 1916

Contents

CHAPTER PART I PAGE

I On Time I

II The Slaughter of the Innocents — Then the

PART II I A Mighty Industry in the Making 131

II The Big Tractor Boom Collapse, and Why 137

III A Modern Miracle in Selling for Cash. . . . 145

IV How the Miracle Was Brought About. ... 150

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CHAPTER PAGE

\^ V Tractors are Not for the Physically Unfit. i6o

VI Visualizing the Tractor Market i66

VII Knowledgeof Farm Management Essential 173 Ji^VIII The Great Selection Problem for the

Farmer 179

-ViX Shall the Tractor Fit the Farm or the Farm

Fit the Tractor 187

X Design, Parts, Service — The Big Little

Things 193

XI Building for Service 199

^i<XII The Horseless Farm 206

XIII Government Selection 214

XIV No Fixed Rules to Guide 223

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M'

On Time

ILLIONS in junk on the farms of America. Waste millions! Who's to blame? The farmer, partly — but not wholly. The man who made these miracle-working implements that have been cast on the scrap-pile long before their time must shoulder his share of responsibility. Not so much because of the way he contrived these wonder-tools as because of the way he sold them.

Let us focus on one of innumerable cases. Here's Farmer Jim Average Jones; a rather likely looking place he's got, but what about that pile of junk in the barnyard ?

Once it was a mower. It came up from the dealer's looking like a bridegroom. Ma and the kids came out and shaded their eyes from the glare of the paint.

Now look at it — and it has just been paid for! The junk-man is coming up tomorrow in that spring-halt old wagon of his to carry it off to his scrap-iron cemetery. He'll trade in a new cookstove for it, and next spring Jim Average Jones will go down to the dealer's and get a new mower.

That's all he cares about it. That poor old mower is the product of a great industry, but that doesn't seem to interest Jim.

The American farmer buys a plow or a planter or a corn sheller or a mower or a side-delivery rake or a silage cutter. It works to his satisfaction or it doesn't. He got it from the dealer on credit, and in the course of time he may pay for it.

As the majority of farmers size up the farm implement industry, tools either work or don't work. If they work the incident is closed, and in the course of time the farmer pays for them. Generally he pays for them after all the shiny paint and gaudy veneer have worn off — not a great while before Bill Binks, the junkman, comes round to trade a new cookstove for it. It looks so cheap and scrappy when Binks carts it off that the farmer is naturally sore at having to pay for it as if it were new.

But the honest farmer pays for it, nevertheless, after he has cashed in his crop, and the dealer in turn pays the manufacturer. The manufacturer in his turn buys some more raw material with which to manufacture other implements.

The sort of purchaser who has had good service from his tools doesn't give a thought to the manufacturer or his problems or his troubles. To him the source of production is some indefinite nowhere just as vague as the mythical workshop of Santa Claus. The other sort of purchaser, who has bought shoddy equipment that didn't work, or just fairly good stuff that was not sufficiently foolproof, as the manufacturer would say, does give a thought or two to the source of production. He whines that he has been stung, gouged, robbed by a trust or some little cousin of a trust. He takes his howl to the dealer and tells him he'll be darned if he'll pay. He calls the dealer names and the dealer retorts. It was an open-account transaction, and the dealer has no documentary proof of purchase. They bicker and threaten each other and at last they go to law about it. In the course of the suit the dealer may go bankrupt and the farmer may move. The lawyers in the case have their fees and that is all the real money that passes. All the manufacturer gets out of it is a few vain regrets.

Indeed, the manufacturer doesn't appear in the matter save as a remote greedy monster who turns out tools from some smoky urban lair. The defendant's lawyer may draw a caricature of him and embellish it with lurid misrepresentations. Nor does the dealer's counsel make kindly mention of the manufacturer. It is a case of the poor downtrodden farmer versus the just-as-poor downtrodden dealer. The manufacturer has no definite shape in the matter. He isn't familiar enough to anybody to be known by his first, middle, or family name. He really doesn't exist, so why bother about him?

The American farmer is buying some ^200,000,000 worth of farm tools a year, and it is estimated that our farms are today stocked with about a billion and a half dollars' worth of implements. They are the best farm implements manufactured on the globe. They represent Yankee ingenuity at its highest, revolutionizing Yankee ingenuity. The evolution of our farm implements has accomplished one of the marvels of two centuries. In 1830 we expended three hours and three minutes of human labor to produce one bushel of wheat. Now, thanks to mechanized efficiency, we cut the fundamental processes of production down to approximately eight minutes per bushel.

Every farmer who has sat in at a farm-implement lecture has heard this. In recent years the achievement has been vitalized on the moving-picture screen. First you are shown an undernourished, bullet-headed ninety-nine per cent naked Egyptian or Syrian fellah guiding a vest-pocket wooden plow over the dirt and scratching up an inch or so of soil from beneath the surface. This pitiable prehistoric chap is plowing at the rate of an acre or so a fortnight, and in the course of time he will cut by hand about eight bushels — if the gods are kind — of wheat, and a little later you will see his grandmother, his mother, his wife and all the kith and kin that swarm the family hut threshing out the grain with some things that resemble slapsticks. Still later you will see them milling it in stone cuspidors and then concocting it into loaves of durable and enduring bread.

Having marveled at a reel or so of this you next glimpse the modern tractor and gang-plows at work on the virgin prairies, followed by harvesters, binders, threshers, and so on. There is a baffling array of machinery, each separate contrivance performing its ingenious function, cutting labor costs and raising the vocation of the farmer from the slavish drudgery of the days of peasant serfdom to the dignity of a scientific or professional calling.

At least, so you may read the pictures if you are endowed with imagination. It is a skillful selling argument and it is a page of American history that is mighty important to understand. It is the secret of why the man power of the American farmer is higher than the man power of any other farmer in the world, not excepting the European farmers with their methods of intensive farming.

The Europeans may throw us into total eclipse when it comes to the employment of thrift and the exercise of self-denial, but when it comes to gaiting 150-acre and 500-acre farms they simply have to trail and take our dust. The whyfor of this takes us back to the Deeres and Olivers, the McCormicks and Deerings, just to mention a few names engraved high on the tablet in the hall of fame of the farm-implement industry. They were the Watts and Stephensons and Edisons of American agriculture, and it might be well for the farm boy to learn something from his schoolbooks concerning what they accomplished in the way of revolutionizing the agricultural industry of the world. Unhappily, our educational system prefers to teach how Cincinnatus left his plow to rust in a Roman field and returned to lead his legions to gory battle. Cincinnatus was a romantic figure because he helped rivers to run with the blood of barbarians, just as Von Hindenburg is a modern Colossus, having abandoned his country estates at the behest of the Kaiser to direct the slaughter of tens of thousands of Russians.

Now that the patents have run out on chilled plows, binders, threshers, mowers and innumerable other implements that were in common use on the farm a generation ago, nobody seems to give a rap how they were evolved or what were the improvements made in the last several decades. You might as well try to weave romance round the buttonhook. The fact that

Isl they are articles of commerce and that the inventors and their successors made millions out of them gives them a sordid, commonplace aspect that fails to thrill.

But, coming up to date and studying the farm-implement industry as a huge and necessary modern enterprise, one need not search far to find a multiplicity of interests. The industry has now become a great and exciting game for those who are in it. The leaders in the industry speak of it as the *' farm-implement game,'* and they also inform you that the game has now reached a phase of evolution or even revolution which will involve a lot of strenuous gambling for future profits. So far as scores of the little fellows in the industry are concerned it will require some tall gambling to keep out of bankruptcy.

The grit in the gears of the farm-implement business is long credits. For two decades it has been recognized as the bane of the industry, but big manufacturers winked the other eye, confident their gears were strong enough to stand it. If the little fellows' gears were ground to bits, that was up to them — they were merely the hop-o'-my-thumbs of industrial competition. But during the past few years the long credits grit has proved a serious menace to the big fellows' transmission, causing them to flock together in sober conclaves, pass resolutions and enter into gentlemen's agreements to readjust.

The readjustment problem was recognized as a tough proposition — one of the toughest propositions that any industry ever tackled. It involved a great variety of causes and effects. It involved the automobile industry and its growth and what its growth has done to hurt the implement game. It involved the beginnings, sudden temporary collapse and recent sensational rebirth of farm-tractor manufacturing and distribution.

The Great War and its influence were involved. Fundamentally and of primary importance was the farmer himself and his hereditary disinclination to pay cash for anything he could get on time. It may not be quite true that he inherited this disinclination, as to lay faults to heredity is simply a lazy habit of passing the buck to our ancestors.

What was undeniably true, however, was that the present generation of farmers found the custom readymade and of simple, effortless attainment. They bought on time, trusted to the gods who fostered crop production to help them pay out, and let it go at that. They bought from the dealers, the majority of whom had been farmers and were therefore accustomed to doing business on time and without the annoyance of keeping books or estimating the cost of overhead charges, or anything of the sort.

It is reckoned that three out of every four implement dealers are former farmers. It is also estimated that one of every four implement dealers goes out of business each year.

In the Eastern districts, particularly in New England, the majority of dealers are just farmer or blacksmith agents, with no stock on hand and not so much business system as a pushcart peddler. In the New England district the majority of the retail business is in the hands of men who have each less than $300 invested in stock.

Naturally there were multitudes of slow accounts and bad accounts, yet way back in the eighties the competition for this slow-pay and no-pay business was fierce. No other word will describe it. In 1880 there were 2000 manufacturers of farm implements. Patents had run out and anybody who had a forge or a small foundry or something resembling a factory could manufacture plows and things and put them out. The prices seemed to hold up high enough to take care of the immense amount of waste. But as competition sped up, the waste for the little fellow increased. Doing business on a narrow margin of capital became more and more risky. With a small and none too efficiently operated plant the cost of manufacture became a bogy. Raw material scaled up in price. Labor was organizing and demanding higher wages. As costs rolled up, prices did not mount to support them in the difficult ascents. The big fellows were saving themselves by increasing the volume of output and cutting production costs.

II The Slaughter of the Innocents — Then the

Tractor

A GRAPHIC chart has been made to illustrate the competition squeeze in the farm imple- ^ ment industry, or what has been called the slaughter of the innocents. This chart shows that in 1880 there were 2000 concerns doing business on a total capital of ^60,000,000. By 1890 between 1000 and 1 100 of these manufacturers had been laid to rest in bankruptcy or else had thrown up their hands and pulled out with what little capital they could rescue. During the next ten years several hundred more dropped out. Ten years ago there remained some six hundred competitors. The shrinking process has continued down to date, and the prospects are that it will continue until the industry is confined to several comparatively small groups and several combinations of groups that were organized during the sweating-out stages of the past decade.

This does not necessarily mean that the farm-implement industry is becoming a close corporation or is tending toward any gigantic combination or trust. Energetic independents are liable to spring up from time to time and intrench themselves so solidly that no sort of combination can dislodge them. There is

V still room for inventive genius backed by a competent sufficiency of capital and modern business skill, and always will be. But the small tradition-following competitor with a narrow, insecure margin of working capital is caught between the long-term-credit millstones and seems to have no hope of prolonged existence unless some of the big combinations should find it profitable to absorb him.

At any rate this was the situation in 1916 so far as the farm-implement industry, properly so called, was concerned. When we come to discuss the new-blooming tractor industry the case is altered somewhat. The cards are just being dealt in the tractor game, and some of the big hands are as likely to fall outside as to fall inside the farm-implement industry. The appearance of the small general-purpose tractor and the measuring of the immense possibilities for its development are bound to draw vigorous new blood and brains to the immediate environment of the farm-implement industry.

During 1915-1916 the tractor industry had an amazing mushroom growth — in some aspects an unhealthy growth, in other aspects a benign growth. It had begun to follow the trail of the automobile industry on a cash-sales basis, and was accomplishing the impossible in this direction, just as the automobile industry did. It bled real hard money from the farmer where real hard money did not seem to exist before, and quickened the farmer's interest in machinery and mechanics as the farm implement never did.

Later I shall give some striking examples of this influence and attempt to analyze it. For the present I shall simply offer a brief review of the widening farm tractor field and the possibilities it seemed to open up for the makers of farm implements equipped to manufacture tractors.

It should be inspiring to the imagination of future gas-tractor Napoleons to learn that our "inefficient underpowered" farms — to quote the present secretary of agriculture and several captains of industry — now employ approximately 24,000,000 mechanical horse power. This is allowing -^-^ mechanical horse power to the farm horse and the farm mule. On January i, 1915, the Department of Agriculture took a census of farm animals and stated that the aggregate of horses and mules was 25,411,000, worth about ^3,000,000,- 000. These horses and mules developed 14,230,000 mechanical horse power.

Add to this 750,000 windmills developing 75,000 horse power, 100,000 steam tractors with 4,000,000 horse power, 1,000,000 gas engines developing 5,000,- 000 horse power and 20,000 gas tractors developing 600,000 horse power, and we have our grand total of 23,905,000 — a grand total, indeed, when you consider that the total power used in all our great and little manufacturing enterprises is only 18,755,286 horse power. The great difference is that the farm power is merely the available power that is applied only as it is needed. Manufacturing power is practically a continuous load. During the war-munition-making period much of it was going day and night. There is no way of estimating the power units applied each year, but undoubtedly they are enormously greater than the power units a year applied on the farm.

In]

^i

That is just where this infant gas tractor is going to fit into the picture. He can stand the emergency endurance test where the horse and the mule fall down. He will pull all your tillage apparatus by moonlight as well as by daylight. If there is no moon all you have to do is to attach a searchlight. And when he isn't doing this field work he can do just what the now almost passe steam tractor is doing in the way of developing belt power. Just how far he will be able to supplant the stationary gas engine for other than pumping and specific household utilities is problematical, but certainly the possibilities are big enough to encourage the gifted promoter and give latitude to the eloquence of the salesman.

The estimate of 20,000 gas tractors was the January I, 191 5, estimate. Kansas was the first state to take a tractor census, but the reports furnished were brought up only to March i, 191 5. The total then was 2500. During the summer that followed Kansas bought more than 500 of the smaller-sized tractors. Just one Kansas City jobbing firm sold 1000 small tractors in Kansas, Oklahoma, Eastern Colorado and Northern Texas in a little more than three months.

One big manufacturing company was making as high as fifty "baby'' gas tractors a day during part of the summer and thirty a day as the demand began to slacken. Forty new tractor concerns came into being in 1914-1915. In a 1916 list of 170 concerns making or assembling and selling tractors two-thirds of them were as new as the modern use of asphyxiating gas as a weapon for offensive warfare.

The steam tractor did not come into extensive use until after the Civil War, and it was then employed chiefly to run threshing outfits, small sawmills and feed grinders. Steam tractors never made good at pulling tillage apparatus because of their great weight and the difficulty in getting water to them on the dry Western plains where they could be used for breaking vast areas of virgin sod. The failure of the steam tractor for this purpose paved the way for the gas tractor, and along about the beginning of this century the big gas tractor came in.

Western Canada was opening up, the Dakotas, Montana, Western Kansas and the plateaus of the mountain states were calling to the plungers in grain to come in and make a killing. It looked like a golden market for the big gas tractor, and the manufacturers went to it. There was an exhilarating boom and then a bang, followed by a sudden collapse. The big gas tractor had been overexploited and oversold.

Numberless excuses were offered and a large variety of causes were carefully dissected. On the ruins of the collapse the long-credit specter sat and grinned. Then there was the human factor that had been too lightly considered. The big gas tractor had been far from foolproof. It was not a simple mechanical device. Its intricacies demanded the control of experts and there were not enough experts to go round. The automobile had not yet begun to teach mechanics to hundreds of thousands of farmers. There was no permanent employment for high-priced mechanics on the farm. Just as is the case with harvest hands — when they were needed most they were scarcest.

There was a depressing lull in the gas-tractor industry during a period of five years and more, and it was within the period of this lull that the automobile began going out to the farm in enormously increased consignments. During the ten-year period that saw the rise and fall of the big gas tractor, farm-implement products increased in value 44.6 per cent. In the same interim automobile products increased in value 5148.6 per cent. How much of this increase was due to the farmer's purchasing power cannot be determined.

The farmer was not a heavy buyer of automobiles during the experimental and testing-out years. City men carried the burden of pioneering costs for the automobile industry. The automobile had to be simplified and cheapened before the farmer could come into the market and buy for cash. The automobile manufacturer had been compelled in the beginning to distribute his product on a cash basis because of the high cost of the product, and the great depreciation in the value of the product immediately it had come into the hands of the purchaser. Practically every motorcar manufacturer who experimented with long credits went to the wall.

The farm-implement people at first watched the automobile begin its rural inroads with small apprehension. They were not prepared for the wave of buying that suddenly set in. It didn't seem possible or at all likely that the farmer could or would pay cash for automobiles when he wouldn't for his harvesting machinery or even his tillage tools. But he did. He had to or go without. He dug up the cash somehow. He overcame his natural reluctance to borrow rather than owe. He went even farther than that — he laid by money with the distinct object of purchasing an automobile. He saved by purchasing fewer farm implements or by making those he had go further than was his custom.

The implement manufacturers complain that he has carried this skimping to excess, with the result that his farm is not nearly so efficiently equipped as it was before he began buying automobiles. It is estimated that in the year 191 5 American farmers bought almost ^200,000,000 worth of automobiles. Iowa farmers alone bought 68,000 cars. The earless Kansas farm is almost a freak. This means that farmers are paying practically as much cash for automobiles as they are owing for implements.

Of course, it is an uneconomic situation and a galling one to the farm-implement group. It has made it more difficult to sell farm implements. Selling costs of both manufacturer and dealer have increased out of all proportion to actual sales.

What the implement manufacturers all seem to have fought shy of is a direct appeal to the imagination of the farmer by modern publicity methods. The automobile manufacturers on the other hand have done this with overwhelming success. Then there are the big mail-order competitors who are regarded by the majority of farm-implement dealers as monstrous devouring ogres. The mail-order catalogues are teaching the farmers to buy for cash. The dealers able to meet this competition complacently are those who are able to pay up and take cash discounts and then sell for cash themselves.

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Service and improved selling methods seem to be the best defensive weapons with which to meet the big mail-order-house competition. Nor is the service end of it without its complications, as I shall endeavor to explain in a later chapter. So far the farmer has not gained a very distinct idea of just what the service advantages are. The automobile industry has done more in two or three years to bring this fact to his door than the farm-implement industry did in fifty. With the inclusion of the small farm tractor he should have a double awakening.

It is very probable that many of the smaller manufacturers will not be able to survive the pinch and strain due to the stocking up of the farm with automobiles at the expense of purchasing farm implements. But the ultimate educating processes cannot fail to exercise a benign influence.

The stationary internal combustion engine is a humdrum contraption by comparison with the automobile. Undoubtedly it has served to supply a primer course, but that is about all. The automobile, you might say, has taken the whole farm family unto itself and compelled it to examine and understand its intricacies. It has given a new interest in the farm to the boy and the girl. It has awakened an interest in tractors in tens of thousands of farmers to whom the tractor would otherwise have remained an object of awe that they would prefer to let the other fellows tinker with; and, still more potent in its direct influence, it has at least begun the education of the farmer in the advantages of paying cash in advance and assuming the full responsibilities of ownership.

You don't see many farm automobiles ditched in fence corners gathering rust and rot, and you won't see a great many tractors that have been paid for on the nail standing out in the field to collect dust and grit in their gears.

Ill

Plows

WHEN you see the womenfolks traipsing along Main Street wearing pill-box hats stuck up with goose quills or upside-down coal scuttles draped with little tomatoes and poison-ivy leaves you throw up your hands and wonder wherever these crazy notions will stop.

Men may not wear such fool clothes, maybe, but how about plows ? Do you know that there are just as highfalutin notions in plows? Well, there are.

The out-for-the-vote sex may have gone in for multifarious fashions in clothes in the course of a few decades, but so has the farmer gone in for multifarious types in plows. And still does.

Down in your valley, or up in your hill country, you may not see so many different sorts and shapes and makes — possibly not more than a dozen different kinds. There may be a couple of types of riding plows, half a dozen varieties of walking plows, and some little old eight-inch plows that a farm chunk can pull along comfortably. There may be a few gang plows about of different makes — probably one or two of the bigger farmers have engine gangs. New big and little tractor gangs began pouring into the market in 1914 and by the spring of 1916 there was a teeming diversity of them. Also, very likely there is at least one man in the neighborhood who is trying out a deep-tilling device.

But your general impression is that plows is plows, just as pigs is pigs.

That isn't so at all. There are more different kinds of plows than there are breeds of dogs. There are immensely more selected types of plows than there are selected breeds of dogs, pigs, dairy cattle, beef animals and horses.

In one of the big plow establishments I visited in Moline, Illinois, I was informed that they made and carried in stock about looo varieties of plows. A neighboring plant carried about half a hundred types, but could further vary this line with attachments and adjustments. In these plants the steel plow was the leader, though they were equipped to satisfy most any plow shopper that came along, whether from the sand dunes of Long Island, New York, or from the tule islands of the San Joaquin Delta, California.

But the catalogue listings of today are not the end in stock by a good deal. No one in the plant where they made and distributed looo varieties could tell the exact number in stock or in the process of fabrication on that specific date. Possibly there were 998, just as likely 1 1 16. New patterns were coming in every few days.