Majorman
Well-known Member
- Location
- Scarning, Norfolk, England
A couple of days ago, I posted a picture of the Howard tractor, this is what the rear looks like with the built-in Rotavator. Howard was a farmer's son in Australia who looked for ways of tilling the soil without ploughing and came up with this. The company started in Wagga-Wagga, a small Australian town, but the Rotavator became very popular and so he set up a factory in England to build for Europe. The Rotavator was soon adapted to horticultural use and a wide range of hand versions were produced, from the Bantam to the large, diesel powered Gem. The company did not stop at these though and went on to build the Rotaped, enabling a wheeled tractor to be quickly changed to gain nearly crawler type performance, much cheaper than a crawler and more useful. Howard also pioneered the barrel type manure spreader, the Rotaspreader, which many firms copied when the patents expired. They also built another tractor for working in swamps and soft ground, the Howard Platypus. In later years they produced the Howard Harvestore and Slurrystore and built the famous MF 30 grain drill for Massey Ferguson. They had factories world wide, one of which was a few miles from me, making the grain drill and the Howard Rotaspike version of the Rotavator. Quite an achievement for a small company.
