Farming Equipment

A simple tractor on a green field with cutting equipment hooked to it. Four or five chickens are gathered around it . — Modern tractors help farmers work quickly and efficiently.
NPS/Arrye Rosser

Using the railroad, manufacturers of farm implements and fertilizers could showcase their wares to all farmers in the area over the course of several days. These fairs encouraged a more scientific approach to farming, rather than simple reliance upon tried, but less-than-true, inherited farming practices.

The C. Aultman & Co. of Canton, Ohio, which manufactured a popular and highly successful harvesting machine called the Buckeye, opened up a branch in Akron in 1863. In 1865 and 1880, John F. Seiberling began production of mowers and reapers for making straw and hay. By 1890, Seiberling's company, the Empire Mower and Reaper Works, was one of the world's largest manufacturers of harvesting machines.

In spite of all these advances, farmers were slow to abandon practices which their ancestors had used for hundreds of years. The county fairs, as well as farmers' institutes, served an educational role to reduce fear of change and to encourage innovation. It was not until the Civil War, when the labor supply diminished, that agricultural improvements began to take hold. The introduction of the thresher in the 1850s, for example, enabled a farmer to thresh a ten-acre field in a day or two, a task that previously would have taken most of the winter with the use of a flail.

Tractors came into popular usage in the 20th century after World War II. After 1945, within two or three years, the majority of farmers in the Cuyahoga Valley began to use tractors instead of horses. Tractors, which enabled farmers to complete a previous week's worth of work in just a couple days, increased the trend towards "weekend farming."

Tractors

2011 Oral History Project: Carl Boodey, from Northfield, explains how tractors became popular in the valley and made farming much more efficient.

Credit / Author:

Carl Boodey

Audio Transcript

“Well during the war, it was all done with, you know, horses and a man, you know. Then after the war, a year or two after the war, they all worked, you know like I told you, in the rubber shops, Cleveland or an industrial place, and they all bought tractors. You could plow more on a Saturday than they could in ~laughs~ a week or more with a horse, and it just changed drastically like that. They all become part time farmers but did as much or more growing stuff than when it was done with horses.”

Quickly Plowing Fields

2011 Oral History Project: Daniel Schneider, who grew up on the Schneider Farm (now Coonrad Ranger Station), describes how new tractors made plowing a quick and easy process.

Credit / Author:

Daniel Schneider

Audio Transcript

“We used to take us, like the sixteen acres across from the farm, it used to take us four days to plow that field. And then later years, when my dad done it, they'd plow sixteen acres in four hours with them big tractors and plows. So it just went so much faster, you know. But years we had them old tractors, and you're only pulling the two bottom plow, then it seemed like it took forever to do that, but you just ride all day forever every day, ~laughs~ and plow when it wasn't raining or whatever.”

Hay Baler

2011 Oral History Project: Jan Thomas, from Everett, talks about the efficiency of the hay baler.

Credit / Author:

Jan Thomas

Audio Transcript

“Well it changed everything because they worked for days and days and days pitching hay. I mean, my grandmother, my grandfather, my father, my uncle. Even we did as children. I mean, we couldn't do a whole bunch but we still, we'd be on the wagon and we'd move the hay forward because the horses would pull the wagon and they'd throw it on the back and then we would move it forward. So then when the baler came . . . the tractor came and then the baler . . . it spit out those bales, you know, and we could just pick the bales up and put 'em on the wagon. There was no hours and hours and hours of pitching hay.”