Tractor advances

[jwal10]

Tractors today have so many things that suck power away from the wheels, hyd/s, powershift and hydrostatic transmissions. Huge electrical systems....James

 

[ss55]

The big difference is the speed at which the load can be pulled. Drawbar power is the pulling force times the speed and power is what gets work done. Those big old tractors could pull a lot but it was at a snail's pace so the actual amount of work done per hour was relatively low.

Draft horses would normally pull at 3 to 4 MPH walking speed. Early tractors were build to work with farmers existing horse drawn equipment. Lugged steel wheels rode rough so 5 MPH was about the maximum speed for steel wheeled tractors.

What is the working speed of modern high HP tractors? They seem to be pulling big tillage equipment in the field at speeds close to what would have been road gear speed for a lot of 1940s and 1950s tractors.

 

[Destroked 450]

I was at Field Days of the Past just outside Richmond Va several years ago and was looking at a brand new John Deere 35 HP tractor. I asked the sales rep if it would pull a square hay baler. He said oh no, that tractor is much too small for that work. I said I had a 30 HP tractor that would pull a square baler just fine and showed him a picture of my Case 300 round nose pulling a square baler. He said that was cheating!

HP is rated differently today, today’s tractors are rated at peak engine hp which for tractors under 100 hp is usually 10-15 hp more than the pto hp rating older tractors were rated at
My neighbors 5525 Deere is advised as a 91 hp tractor, on the pto it has 3 more hp than my Ford 6610 which when new was advised as a 72 hp tractor
That little 35 hp Deere will probably be lucky to have 27 pto hp

 

[BarnyardEngineering]

Draft horses would normally pull at 3 to 4 MPH walking speed. Early tractors were build to work with farmers existing horse drawn equipment. Lugged steel wheels rode rough so 5 MPH was about the maximum speed for steel wheeled tractors.

What is the working speed of modern high HP tractors? They seem to be pulling big tillage equipment in the field at speeds close to what would have been road gear speed for a lot of 1940s and 1950s tractors.

Yup, 12MPH in the field with vertical tillage and "speed disks" is pretty common. HP requirements go up exponentially with speed.

I think 3-4MPH is being pretty generous for a draft horse. That was about how fast you'd plow with a tractor in the 1940's, and you were setting the world on fire.

 

[ss55]

Yup, 12MPH in the field with vertical tillage and "speed disks" is pretty common. HP requirements go up exponentially with speed.

I think 3-4MPH is being pretty generous for a draft horse. That was about how fast you'd plow with a tractor in the 1940's, and you were setting the world on fire.

Yeah, I first though 2 1/2 to 3 MPH would be draft horse speed. Everything on the internet said 3 to 4.

 

[Tx Jim]

My neighbor told be his new JD 5100 tractor uses 5 gph of fuel while my JD 4255 used 3.2 gph & my smaller/lower HP Kubota @ 64 pto hp used 2.5 gph of fuel pulling the very same JD 467 rd baler baling hay. I don't classify that as progress/advancing

 

[T in NE]

What they are running into is resale. There is no market for used equipment that big.

 

[paul]

What they are running into is resale. There is no market for used equipment that big.

A person can’t afford to fix something with that much electrical, hydraulic, and sensor features on it. After 10 years who can keep up with that much old frayed hose and wire on it?

Needs to to be run hard and used up before the components go bad with age. Mostly a lease, or extended warranty and flip it before the warrantee expires, let the company own it and responsible for the repairs. Too costly to maintain.

It’s not bad, it just requires lots of acres to wear it out in a short time, instead of running 160 acres for 40 years, need to run 5000 acres for 5 years. Progress.

Paul

 

[ss55]

I took an ag engineering course while a student at Cornell. One theme that was repeatedly spoken was that farm equipment engineers were limited by the money that a farmer would typically spend on a piece of equipment. The instructor said that it was very possible to build a tractor with multiple speeds (versus 2 or 3), live PTO, and overhead valve engines during the 1920's but would so add to the purchase price that the demand would be very minimal. The mantra was do not get too far ahead of the industry as there will be no customer base for a product well above the average price. One reason that nearly all US manufacturers built essentially the same tractor over and over again with minimal change from 1940 to 1960.

I agree, the technology definitely existed back then. However in the early 1920s there was another big factor influencing the tractor market. Fordson flooded the tractor market with inexpensive tractors capturing up to 77 percent of the total market in 1923. A US total of 739,977 Fordson tractors were sold in only nine years between 1920 and 1928 before US production ended. That is a lot of tractors sold in a short time. The next best selling tractor the Ford N series tractors only sold about 524,00 units in 13 years between 1939 and 1952. The Farmall H sold 391,222 units in 13 years between 1939-1952. The John Deere Model B sold 303,279 units in 17 years between 1935 and 1952. The John deere 4020 sold 184,829 units in nine years between 1964 and 1972.

The book Tractor Wars and its Iowa Public Television documentary tell the story well. Later other tractor manufacturers regained market share by developing row crop tractors that could do jobs that the low cost mass produced Fordson could not. I'm not sure if that would be called new technology or just innovative design using existing technology.

https://www.amazon.com/Tractor-Wars-International-Harvester-Agriculture/dp/1953295746

By the 1960s cheap labor was a big factor influencing the Farm machinery market. Vegetable planting and harvesting equipment technology existed but was so expensive that there was no market demand for that equipment. Vegetable farmers asked manufacturers: Why should I buy your expensive machines when I can hire all the day laborers I need for under half the minimum wage?

 

[Destroked 450]

Is progress for 1 at the cost of 31 other farmers really progress

 

[Not db4600]

I agree, the technology definitely existed back then. However in the early 1920s there was another big factor influencing the tractor market. Fordson flooded the tractor market with inexpensive tractors capturing up to 77 percent of the total market in 1923. A US total of 739,977 Fordson tractors were sold in only nine years between 1920 and 1928 before US production ended. That is a lot of tractors sold in a short time. The next best selling tractor the Ford N series tractors only sold about 524,00 units in 13 years between 1939 and 1952. The Farmall H sold 391,222 units in 13 years between 1939-1952. The John Deere Model B sold 303,279 units in 17 years between 1935 and 1952. The John deere 4020 sold 184,829 units in nine years between 1964 and 1972.

The book Tractor Wars and its Iowa Public Television documentary tell the story well. Later other tractor manufacturers regained market share by developing row crop tractors that could do jobs that the low cost mass produced Fordson could not. I'm not sure if that would be called new technology or just innovative design using existing technology.

https://www.amazon.com/Tractor-Wars-International-Harvester-Agriculture/dp/1953295746

By the 1960s cheap labor was a big factor influencing the Farm machinery market. Vegetable planting and harvesting equipment technology existed but was so expensive that there was no market demand for that equipment. Vegetable farmers asked manufacturers: Why should I buy your expensive machines when I can hire all the day laborers I need for under half the minimum wage?

This is an old post I shouldn’t be involved with.
Same lineage, same rating. Different times, different horses.

 

[G1000VISTA]

I've always heard that the reason the older tractors pull better is because the engineer's built them with lots of weight in them versus now where they build them light then weight them up. You get into the Big Buds and Steigers , they built them with 60 percent of the weight on the front axle , 40 on the rear. Then when you hook to your plow equipment it equals out at 50/50.