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The big undeveloped farm market is the small farm from 50 to 100 acres. It is this market that the farm tool makers are now trying to develop. The key to it is an efficient tractor priced at substantially less than $500, a machine which no manufacturer has yet been able to make at a profit, though experimentation is continuous. The low-priced field at present is around $600. Even Henry Ford, though he still thinks tractors cost too much, gave up trying to reduce prices, the Fordson now being made in Ireland.
Latest entry in the fa?t tractor field is Sears, Roebuck & Co. Made by Graham-Paige Motors Corp. the mail-order tractor is named Graham-Bradley after the Brothers Graham, Joseph (President) and Robert (Executive Vice President) and Sears' Bradley line of farm tools. Priced around $1,100, placed on sale last fortnight, the tractor will be sold and serviced through Sears retail stores and agencies.
The Graham-Bradley is far from the first Graham tractor ever built. The Grahams have farmed the same land in Indiana since great-great-grandfather Ziba Foote Graham got it from the Government about the time of the War of 1812. In the late 1880s another Ziba Foote Graham, father of the motor-making brothers, invented a gigantic steam tractor but found it so hard to steer that he never tried to manufacture it. In 1917 they built another tractor but dropped manufacturing plans when the Fordson tractor rolled into the farm market. The third Graham tractor was all set for production when Depression knocked the bottom out of farm machinery.
Though reported to be considering a mail-order tractor, Montgomery Ward & Co. still handles only tractor parts and a set of gadgets by which a resourceful farmer can turn his old Ford into a tractor.