Brian says that all Ford dealerships were forced to sell tractors even if they were in a city location, resulting in many being modified for city service with snow plows or paving equipment! Hemmings agrees

a very interesting analysis of the introduction of mechanization and it's role in bringing about the great depression is at  http://www.middle-america.com/wp/tag/fordson/

No, Ford had little to do with the great depression, I'm not connecting Ford with it. Tractors though, had a lot to do with the great depression. How about that for an odd introspection!

Bankers preferred to make loans to farmers, on the farm mortgage, and on the tractors and equipment... because, they knew that a farmer was going to pay that loan back in order to keep making a living.

On the other hand, making a loan to a car buyer, well, the car can be driven far away from the bank's ability to get it back, and it's only a "joy ride" machine, not a thing depended on for making a living. So, banks weren't as happy about car loans.

Well, banks were fat and happy mortgaged out the wazoo on farms, and those had a big problem in 1926 with pigs, and suddenly, the banks foreclosed the farms, kicking out all the farmers, and there simply was no one in the cities looking to by the farms. Farmers couldn't afford to, and city people didn't want the labor intensive acquisition. So, farms went fallow. The number of people off the farms, who couldn't find jobs in skilled labor or white collar work went through the roof, and food wasn't being made on farms to the same level it used to be.

Then you had the upturned soil getting blown about, and the dust bowl problem became wide spread, and the farms weren't getting worked, and the farmer families moved west.


It is relevant to note that, in 1900, 90 percent of U.S.A. citizens were living and working on the farms; in 1979 only 7 percent were on the farms, mostly as local supervisors for big, absent-ownership corporations. The owners of the farmlands today are no longer “farmers” or even individual humans—they are the great business conglomerates. What began in 1934 as government subsidies and loans to farmers for farm machinery, later to keep acreage out of production, would by 1978 result in President Carter making enormous payments to appease big corporations for cutting off vital grain and other strategic shipments to Russia. Next, the U.S. government would make enormous subsidies to bail out large corporations such as Lockheed and Chrysler, which as basic military suppliers the U.S. government could not allow to go bankrupt. Eventually the U.S. taxpayers will be asked to make “free-of-risk” bail-outs of “private” enterprises, corporations with initial physical assets worth over a billion dollars classifed as risk enterprises.   http://www.middle-america.com/wp/tag/fordson/

https://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/10/16/charlie-beesleys-car-pictures-part-3-sales-and-service/