Caveat Tractor

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Back in Nebraska, he discovered the Ford not only wouldn’t pull two plows, but it was not mechanically sound and hardly worked. It didn’t live up to the manufacturer’s billing.

He convinced the company to trade his 1916 model for their new 1917 Model Ford. The result was similar. The 1917 model also had mechanical problems, and with Ford Tractor Co. in serious financial straits, Crozier soon was out $350, plus expenses, so he parked the non-working machine permanently in a corner of a field.

Oops! Once More

Going from bad to worse, Crozier bought a used Little Bull tractor, also advertised to pull two plows. Once more, the advertising hype had little basis in fact. Because the machine was low to the ground with its guts open to field dust, the Little Bull choked in dirt. Record numbers of them broke down, just as Crozier’s did.

A lesser person than Crozier would have given up on tractors. Instead, in 1918 he bought a used Rumely OilPull tractor rated to pull three plows. As Professor C.W. Smith wrote in History of the Nebraska Law, “(Crozier) pulled five bottoms satisfactorily with this tractor, which gave him absolutely no trouble.”

So Crozier asked himself what turned out to be a history-altering question: “If one manufacturer can build a dependable tractor why can’t all tractors be dependable?”

For Crying Out Loud

For years farmers had been agitating for standardized ratings for tractors so everyone knew what they were getting. Farmers didn’t yet know how to fix the relatively new internal combustion engines. So when things went wrong, they were at the mercy of tractor companies.

In 1915, farmers and some manufacturers asked the federal government to set up a standardized rating system and a national testing station. Unfortunately, nobody could agree whether the Bureau of Standards in the Department of Commerce or the Office of Farm Management under the Department of Agriculture was best suited for the job. So the concept was dropped.

The situation became ever more critical. The United States entered World War I, where at first the military refused to use tractors because they were deemed undependable, and took horses instead, which lowered the number of horses available for farmers, and increased pressure on them to buy a tractor. But how could they make an informed decision without a universal standardized testing system?

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