Can't offer any historical resources.....by crop numbers, do you mean 'yields'? I'm not sure how much the use of tractors contributed to increased yields; more than likely, it was soil conservation and the use of fertlizers, chemicals and hybrid seed, among other things. When I's a kid, most folks saved their own cotton seed to plant 'next' year and planted corn from the corn crib. I came along at the tail-end of the share-cropper/manual labor (human and animal) era. There were VERY few horses in my part of the country, but literally thousands and thousands of mules. I'm about 50 miles North of Memphis, which at one time was the "mule capitol of the world". I can still remember folks plowing straight up and down the hills and the middles washing out knee-deep after a big rain; the top soil around 'here' was often 40 ft deep, but even that couldn't last forever. Some of the older farmers would only begrudgingly use a little fertilizer, which was invariably 'Bulldog sodie'. It was Nitrate of Soda (16-0-0, if I remember correctly); was imported from Chile and had a picture of a bulldog on the bag. My dad bought our first tractor....a tricycle single-front tire Avery.......in 1951; it replaced 2 teams of mules. One team was Bill and Pat; can't remember the others. (My grand-dad's were Bob and Mandy; half brother and sister iron grays). Some 2,4-D was already being used in corn and Toxaphene or DDT (for bugs) in cotton, but I remember very well the first cotton herbicide in the mid-'50s (Karmex). Enough already..........
This post was edited by thurlow at 09:30:23 02/08/11.
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