The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE MECHANIZATION OF AGRICULTURE
The following material shows why one American farmer is now able to 
feed more than a hundred people. Ford and Crowther (1926, pp. 164–165) 
add that 10 tractors plowed 1,000 acres in Armenia in the space of 11 days. 
This task would have otherwise required 1,000 oxen and 500 laborers. The 
same reference adds that, in French Morocco, a threshing machine could 
process as much grain as 135 men.
Soviet Russia also was eager to buy Ford’s tractors. Ford News (1922, 
December 15, p. 3) adds, “ ‘Fifty thousand American tractors,’ said Mr. 
[David A.] Brown, ‘will do more than $100,000,000 in foodstuffs to save 
the Russian people from starvation and put them back on the road to eco-
nomic liberty.’ ” Brown, a relief and construction worker, added that he 
had seen Russian children in loin cloths while the exchange rate was 17 
million rubles to the dollar. The catastrophic effects of the Communist 

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184  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
system had done to the ruble what would later happen to the Weimar 
Deutschmark and the currency of Zimbabwe.
* * *
It is important that it shall be cheap. Otherwise power will not go to all the 
farms. And they must all of them have power. Within a few years a farm 
depending solely on horse and hand power will be as much of a curiosity as 
a factory run by a treadmill. The farmer must either take up power or go 
out of business. The cost figures make this inevitable. During the war the 
Government made a test of a Fordson tractor to see how it’s costs compared 
with doing the work with horses. The figures on the tractor were taken at the 
high price plus freight. The depreciation and repair items are not so great as 
the report sets them forth, and even if they were, the prices are cut in halves 
which would therefore cut the depreciation and repair charge in halves. These 
are the figures: