Of all motor vehicles the farm tractor has proved to be among the most beneficial. It has freed hundreds of thousands of laborers and horses from backbreaking toil on the land in all weathers and it has stabilized the cost of food.
Starting with steam power in the middle of the nineteenth century, the agricultural tractor became motorized in the early years of the twentieth century. From vast prairie types, lighter, one-man machines arrived in time to avert famine in the First World War. Mass production followed, which brought the price of tractors within reach of the average farmer. Meanwhile tractors changed from being simple substitutes for draught animals to highly sophisticated machines, with power takeoffs and hydraulically mounted implements. Pneumatic tires and diesel engines revolutionized the 1930s market, after which draught control and then inexpensive four-wheel-drive made sure that fuel and time went into crop production rather than wheelspin. This marked the end of the widespread use of tracked crawlers, as powerful and efficient wheeled tractors took their place, incorporating the latest multi-range transmission technology.
All the key developments and significant tractor makers are described in this book, from the beginning of the tractor's development to the 1970s. Illustrated by period views of machines at work and in contemporary sales literature, this is a nostalgic history of the machine that has been at the center of agricultural life since before World War II.

Like Henry Ford, Herbert Austin had farming roots. Both brought motoring to the masses and both attempted to take the physical drudgery out of farming by introducing mechanisation. Austin imported American machines in the First World War and heard about the revolutionary new Fordson. His take on the new rigid, frameless technology was the 1919 Austin R, built at his Birmingham car factory. The inexorable reduction of the price of Fordsons saw Austin move his tractors to the more protected French market, where they soon challenged Renault's dominance. A former leather works with farming estate at Liancourt, near Paris, became exclusive home to Austin's tractors, and diesel technology was adopted there long before it was introduced at Austin in England. The Second World War saw Liancourt producing German military vehicles and the imprisonment and in some cases execution of the Austin management. The dreadful conditions at Liancourt were highlighted at the Nuremberg Trials. Afterwards, there was a brave attempt to revive the French tractors and British Austin engines were used in Bristol crawlers. This book tells the fascinating and largely untold story of the tractors made by one of Britain's biggest car makers, and also looks other uses of Austin engines in the Austin Champ and Gipsy.