Remembering the days when small tractors did it all

When I was a kid during the 1940s, my grandfather owned two adjoining farms in western Pennsylvania totaling about 300 acres. Much of the land was taken up by woods, pastures and orchards, and I suppose we actually raised crops on less than half of that acreage. Most of the farms around ours were probably about 50 to 150 acres.

Virtually every one of those farmers had a single tractor with which they did all the work required, although a few supplemented the tractor with a team of horses. When I think of those tractors,