Farmer inventions have made life much easier

Thursday, February 3, 2005 9:24 AM CST

Last month Case IH celebrated the production of the 50,000th Steiger at its plant in Fargo. This was an especially momentous day, not only for Case IH, but for members of the Steiger family who attended the celebration.

John Steiger and his sons, Douglas and Maurice, built the first Steiger tractor in 1957, basically from spare parts. The aspiration to build this tractor came mainly from looking for a way to make their farm, near Red Lake Falls, Minn., more productive.

Stories of this nature have been repeated hundreds of times across rural America, as farmers, or their local machine or blacksmith shops, have designed and built a piece of equipment that would help them improve their efficiency, only to see their invention later being marketed to the masses.

For instance, we have Cyril and Louis Keller, from Rothsay, Minn., who designed and built the first skid-steer loader, a two-wheel drive unit with a small set of caster wheels in the rear that permitted the machine to turn around in it's own track. This machine was originally designed to clean turkey barns and was light enough to be lifted up to the second floor of the barn. In just a short time the Kellers joined forces with the Melroes and their original machine evolved into the present Bobcat skid-steer loader.

The Melroe family wasn't a stranger to inventions, either. E.G. Melroe knew there had to be a better way to pick up swathed grain, so he invented the world's first windrow pickup in 1937 but sold the design in 1939 for $5000 to the John Deere Co., which still uses the basic design principle yet today. A few years later Melroe developed another windrow pickup that used an aluminum faced surface, rather than rubber belting, which was the patent sold to Deere. The Melroe family went on to invent the spring-tooth Harroweeder in 1952 and a few years later, the Multiweeder.

Aneta, N.D., area farmer Sherman Quanbeck was frustrated by broken plowshares or constantly having to re-hitch the plow to the tractor when plowing rocky fields. As a solution to these problems, he developed and patented the automatic re-set trip beam plow. Quanbeck took his concept to Ed Reiten's machine shop in Cooperstown, N.D., where the plow was mass produced and marketed.

Reiten himself had conceived a few products that made farming easier, including the steel hay stacker tooth and aluminum truck bodies.

Agricultural field spraying methods were changed by the introduction of the Spra-Coupe by John Kirschmann of Kirschmann Manufacturing. This Bismarck inventor also introduced to farmers a grain drill that used a variable speed feed shaft to regulate seeding rate, which he felt was superior to changing the size of the drill seed opening.

Those are just a few of the inventions that have occurred in this area over the last half century. In looking back on history on a national level, Virginia farmer Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper at the age of 22. This "Virginia Reaper" enabled one person to harvest an acre an hour compared to the hand scythe method of one-half acre a day. He only sold 29 reapers in 1843, but eventually his business would become the International Harvester Company.

Plowing was revolutionized when a small town blacksmith in Grand Detour, Ill., made the first cast-iron plow in 1838. The inventor, John Deere, saw the start of an implement manufacturing firm that would grow to be one of the largest farm equipment manufacturers in the world.

Yes, the production of the 50,000th Steiger tractor was something that Case IH can be very proud of, a milestone worthy of celebration. But it also serves as a tribute to the thousands of farmer-inventors who have helped improve agriculture's productivity by devising labor saving equipment. The entire ag industry is indebted to these free spirited innovators.

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