Tillage - it all started with a stick
Friday, May 6, 2011
Today's tillage revolution has its roots in the 1950s, when horse-drawn equipment made the transition to tractors. A pioneer in the farm machinery business and a collector of antique tractors recalls how the evolution took place
by MIKE MULHERN
The earliest tillage, probably, was a sharp stick in the ground pulled by someone or something to create a furrow. Then we went to plows, then plows with coulters, then tractors and multi-furrow plows and now we're heading to a different place where the plow is being outperformed by vertical tillage tools that like to run fast behind tractors with big power.
One of the reasons for the switch is something called lignin, an integral part of the secondary cell walls of plants. It makes plants, especially corn, stand so they are tougher, sharper and harder to cut.
The evolution of farm tillage took thousands of years but, in the last 60 years, we've made great strides because we have things at our disposal that our forefathers couldn't have imagined – mega horsepower, hydraulic power and GPS technology along with, of course, genetic modification.
If we start in 1950, lots of Ontario farmers were sending their teams out to pasture and replacing them with small tractors. The Ford 8N was offered with a three-point hitch, a two-furrow plow and a small set of disks. Most tractors were in the 20-30 horsepower range and didn't even have a three-point hitch. They were perfect for taking over from the horses and just tilling or planting, using much the same tillage equipment the horses had used.
Bill Patterson, who farms and collects antique tractors near Dutton, was in the farming and farm machinery business in 1948 along with his brother and father. W. A. Patterson and Sons, located south of Dutton, sold Cockshutt tractors.
"A lot of horse equipment in that era was used on tractors and the one I can think of particularly was the grain drill," he recalls.
"I can still see a neighbor who planted well into the '60s or '70s with a horse drill. It was the same as a tractor drill except it didn't have a (mechanical) lift. So when he got to the end of the field, he hopped off the tractor, ran around behind the drill and pulled the lever to lift, turned in the headland, got off the tractor again, lowered the drill with the lever, put the tractor back in gear and went down the field.
"The lever was at the back of the drill because when you were walking behind the drill with a team of horses, you used this lever to raise the drill."
Patterson says a lot of the stuff that was part of the transition from horses to tractors is still in use, just in a more modern form.
"The diamond harrow, the spring-tooth harrow and the disk were the main tillage tools after the plow. The clay ground was always plowed in the fall and the sand ground in the spring. Then we'd cultivate the field multiple times and we'd always harrow it with the diamond tooth harrow and then we planted." Patterson says the disk was used if the plowed field got grassy.
"The spring tooth," Patterson explains, "came from the horse days. It was really a horse tool that we hooked the tractor on." An early advance was the use of a rope pull to activate a mechanical lift. Cultivators were also a mainstay of tillage in the 1950s.
"There wasn't a lot of mounted equipment in 1950," Patterson says. "I'd have to think three quarters of the tractors were used without a three-point hitch."
Part of the reason people got away with small equipment then was that farms were divided into many small fields, the majority of them just eight acres.
"We had a number of eight-acre fields and then a few of 16 (on a 100-acre farm)," Patterson says. "In those fields, we had a field of oats always, a field of wheat, a field of corn and then a hay field and pasture fields." They also might have had edible beans and fields of timothy and red clover.
There weren't many diesel tractors sold in Ontario initially, either. Most tractors were gas-powered. One of the prized tractors in Patterson's antique collection is a 1956 David Brown 50D. Part of the value of the tractor is that it has the same steering wheel that was used in the Aston Martin DB4 sports car, which was also produced in 1956 by David Brown.
Patterson has a special fondness for David Brown equipment because he worked for the company from 1960 to 1973 as their district manager, beginning in northern Ontario and moving down to take over the southwestern Ontario district after a year.
"When I started with them in 1960," Patterson says, "they were the largest gear company in the world." They had quite an agricultural pedigree. too.
"Back in 1938, Harry Ferguson had come up with the idea of the three-point hitch and draft control hydraulic and started building the tractor," Patterson says. "He had a motor lined up and he went to David Brown, being the largest gear company, and asked if they would build a transmission for him. He didn't have a place to build his tractor and David said, 'Why don't we do it as a joint venture in my plant? We'll take a corner of the gear division and we'll build the tractor together.' The first tractor in the world with a three-point hitch was a Brown Ferguson." That tractor evolved into the Ford Ferguson 9N (the nine being 1939) and the Ford Ferguson 2N, which came out in 1942, and the Ford 8N, which came out in 1948. BF
Next time, agronomist and tillage specialist Pat Lynch talks about today's tillage revolution and some of the equipment that is tilling and levelling our fields in one quick pass.