The College’s Book & Plow Farm on the edge of campus—which hires students, runs a CSA and supplies the dining hall—is now the proud owner of a second-hand, electric-powered cultivating tractor. The assistant farm manager gives the backstory.
2021: Summer Tractor Tale
Brow on the new tractor. It’s a “game-changer for our farm,” she writes, and for the students who work there.
When our Case 265 cultivating tractor bit the dust midseason in 2019, no one was surprised. She had been our Goldilocks tractor. With her sensitive throttle, clutch and hydraulic lever, everything had to be just right, and even then, she leaked oil and popped out of gear. She was hard to control whenever a front tire drove over a rock (and our soil has no shortage of rocks). We knew her end was near.
This year we received $2,500 from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation to help purchase a replacement: an Allis Chalmers G tractor that had been converted to battery power.
This has long been our dream tractor. It fits our values well, being more sustainable, easier to train student farmers on and critical to efficient crop production.
On average, one of our student crew members can crawl-weed a bed of carrots at a rate of 300 minutes per 150-foot bed. On a tractor it takes one person under 10 minutes per bed, even when the carrots are small and hard to see. The G increases productivity in other areas of the farm as well: each bed we tractor-cultivate will result in a savings of 290 minutes of labor that can be put toward other production needs. This labor savings also translates to a lower cost of production for our root crops.
A local farmer sold us the tractor for $3,000. The beauty of an electric tractor is that the engine and fuel systems are taken out, greatly reducing the need for maintenance. We bought fresh batteries for $1,000.
Our records from 2017 to 2019 show that our root crop sales are limited only by how much we can grow: we produced about 15 percent of the carrots used by Amherst College Dining, our main customer. We are confident that an increase in yield will directly relate to an increase in sales. Any surplus goes to our CSA, the Amherst Survival Center and other hunger relief organizations. (Book & Plow received a state Food Security Infrastructure Grant to help reduce food insecurity in Western Massachusetts.) With the new tractor, we can now justify an increase in our root production, knowing we’ll be able to weed them and have demand for them.
The electric G is a real game-changer for our farm. We’d already experienced the efficiency that comes with a cultivating tractor, albeit a finicky one. This new tractor allows us not only to grow more food with less effort but to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. It also empowers our student employees, teaching them an important new skill rather than having them perpetually crawl-weeding carrots.
Photograph by Maria Stenzel