Tractor Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
This tractor trivia quiz has 59 free questions with answers and starts where the word itself started, with the Latin 'trahere', and rolls through the whole story of the machine: John Froelich's 1892 gasoline engine in Iowa, Hart-Parr coining the word 'tractor', Henry Ford's Fordson, the Ford-Ferguson handshake, the Farmall row-crop revolution and the Little Grey Fergie that reached the South Pole. There is plenty of brand lore for the shed-and-showground crowd - why Allis-Chalmers went orange, what Minneapolis-Moline called its yellow, why old Deeres are 'Johnny Poppers' - along with Lamborghini and Porsche tractors, the Big Bud 747, the JCB Fastrac speed record, the Nebraska Tractor Test Law and the 540 rpm PTO. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups for anyone who has driven a tractor; the rest climb toward collector-club territory. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and manufacturer histories, and each explanation adds one more fact worth knowing.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'tractor' comes from the Latin verb 'trahere', which means what?
To pull
To pull. A century before any farm machine took the name, 'tractors' were a quack cure: a pair of metal rods drawn over the skin, sold to pull rheumatism out of the body.
Q 02In Pixar's 'Cars', the tractors in the fields outside Radiator Springs behave like which animals?
Cows
Cows. Mater takes Lightning McQueen 'tractor tipping', a send-up of cow tipping, and the pair end up chased off by Frank, a huge combine harvester who plays the angry bull.
Q 03Which British tractor maker bought the sports-car firm Aston Martin in 1947?
David Brown
David Brown. He answered a newspaper classified offering a 'High Class Motor Business', paid for it with his gear and tractor fortune, and put his initials on every DB model that followed.
Q 04The pioneering Hart-Parr tractor company was organised in 1901 in which town?
Charles City, Iowa
Charles City, Iowa. It was Charles Hart's birthplace: when the partners outgrew Madison, Wisconsin, his father talked local businessmen into backing the first factory built purely for tractors.
Q 05In which state did John Froelich build the first successful forward-and-reverse gasoline tractor in 1892?
Iowa
Iowa. Froelich was fed up with steam engines that threatened to set dry fields alight, and that autumn his gasoline machine threshed 72,000 bushels of grain in South Dakota.
Q 06In 1918 Deere & Company bought its way into the tractor business by purchasing which Iowa firm?
Waterloo Gasoline Engine Co.
Waterloo Gasoline Engine Co. Deere had a full line of farm implements but no successful tractor of its own, so it bought the maker of the popular Waterloo Boy.
Q 07John Deere made his famous 1837 self-scouring plow in Grand Detour, Illinois, from what?
A steel saw blade
A steel saw blade, by most accounts. Sticky prairie soil clung to the iron and wooden plows of the day, but it slid off Deere's polished steel, so farmers no longer had to stop and scrape.
Q 08Where is Deere & Company headquartered?
Moline, Illinois
Moline, Illinois. John Deere moved his plow works there from Grand Detour in the 1840s for the Mississippi River, which gave him both shipping and water power, and the company never left.
Q 09Which director's 1999 film 'The Straight Story' follows an old man's 240-mile journey on a John Deere lawn tractor?
David Lynch
David Lynch. The real Alvin Straight was 73 and couldn't see well enough for a driving licence, so in 1994 he set off on his 1966 John Deere mower to reach a brother who had suffered a stroke.
Q 10Old John Deere tractors earned the nickname 'Johnny Popper' because of what?
Their two-cylinder exhaust note
Their two-cylinder exhaust note. Deere stuck with two big cylinders for decades because the simple engine was cheap to build, and the popping only fell silent when four- and six-cylinder models took over at the start of the 1960s.
Q 11In which Texas city did John Deere unveil its 'New Generation of Power' tractors to thousands of flown-in dealers in 1960?
Dallas
Dallas. Deere chartered planes to bring its dealers in for a single day, lined the new tractors up beside the Cotton Bowl and put one on show inside the Neiman Marcus department store.
Q 12Software locks on John Deere tractors made the brand a flashpoint for which consumer movement?
Right to repair
Right to repair. Locked out of their own machines, some farmers turned to cracked firmware traded online from Eastern Europe, and in 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission sued Deere over its repair restrictions.
Q 13Where did John Deere unveil a self-driving tractor in January 2022?
Q 21Massey-Harris, Harry Ferguson's 1953 merger partner, was based in which Canadian city?
Toronto
Toronto. The Massey family's farm-machinery fortune gave the city its Massey Hall concert venue, and the merged firm's name, Massey-Harris-Ferguson, was trimmed to Massey Ferguson in 1958.
Q 22Which corporation has owned Massey Ferguson since buying it in 1994?
AGCO
AGCO. The Georgia company was only four years old, formed when managers bought out Deutz-Allis in 1990, and the deal turned it almost overnight from a mid-sized American firm into a world player.
Q 23In tractor pulling, what makes the sled harder to drag the farther it travels?
Its weight box slides forward
Consumer Electronics Show
Consumer Electronics Show. Deere rolled its driverless tractor into the Las Vegas gadget fair rather than a farm show, part of a push to build 'smart machines' that can work a field on their own.
Q 14Henry Ford's first Fordson tractors of 1917 were shipped to which wartime ally?
Britain
Britain. German submarines were sinking its food imports, so the government ordered thousands, and nearly all of Ford's early tractors crossed the Atlantic before American farmers could buy one.
Q 15Fordson tractors were built in Cork, Ireland, and later in which English town from 1933 to 1964?
Dagenham
Dagenham. Shipping raw materials into Ireland and paying customs duties on the tractors coming out had made the Cork works too costly, so Ford moved the whole line to its new English plant.
Q 16The 1939 Ford 9N was the first American production tractor to incorporate which invention?
Three-point hitch
Three-point hitch. Harry Ferguson's linkage made the drag of a plough press the rear wheels into the ground, so a light, cheap tractor could grip and pull like a far heavier one.
Q 17Harry Ferguson and Henry Ford's 1938 deal to build tractors rested on what?
A handshake
A handshake. With nothing on paper, Henry Ford II was free to end the deal in 1947, and Ferguson's lawsuit against Ford was settled in 1952 for just over $9 million.
Q 18In 1909, tractor pioneer Harry Ferguson became the first person in Ireland to do what?
Fly an aeroplane he built
Fly an aeroplane he built. Ferguson toured that year's air shows at Blackpool and Reims taking notes, then designed his own monoplane and coaxed it about 130 yards on the last day of December.
Q 19What did the letters TE stand for in the Coventry-built Ferguson TE20, the 'Little Grey Fergie'?
Tractor England
Tractor England. The TE20 was built for Ferguson in Coventry by the Standard Motor Company, which needed work for a huge wartime aero-engine factory that was standing empty.
Q 20Which explorer drove Ferguson farm tractors to the South Pole in January 1958?
Edmund Hillary
Edmund Hillary. His job was only to lay supply depots for Vivian Fuchs's crossing party, but with that done he pressed on in three converted tractors and beat Fuchs to the Pole by about a fortnight.
Its weight box slides forward. Geared to the sled's wheels, the box creeps along the rails and presses a steel pan into the dirt until the tractor stalls; a run that still reaches the end of the track is a 'full pull'.
Q 24Farmall tractors left the factory grey until 1936, when the whole line switched to which colour?
Red
Red. The bright paint was chosen to be seen from a distance: a farmer could spot a neighbour's tractor across the fields and know its make at once, which worked as free advertising.
Q 25Which industrial designer gave the 1939 Farmall Letter Series its streamlined look?
Raymond Loewy
Raymond Loewy. The designer of the Lucky Strike pack and the Shell logo was hired to restyle the maker's entire product line, and the sleek new Farmalls that resulted proved a huge success.
Q 26The Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory became one of the fiercest battlegrounds of which World War II battle?
Stalingrad
Stalingrad. The plant, laid out by Henry Ford's factory architect Albert Kahn, had switched to war production, and during the battle T-34s were driven unpainted off the line and straight into the fighting.
Q 27The smallest tractor in the Farmall line, launched in 1947, was given which animal name?
Cub
Cub. Aimed at one-mule farms that still relied on horse-drawn equipment, it set its engine off to the left so the driver had a clear view of the crop row being cultivated.
Q 28Which animal, modelled on a Civil War regiment's mascot, was tractor maker Case's trademark for over a century?
A bald eagle
A bald eagle. 'Old Abe' was carried into battle on a perch by the 8th Wisconsin Infantry, and the same bird later became the 'screaming eagle' on the shoulder patch of the 101st Airborne Division.
Q 29In 1986 Case IH bought which four-wheel-drive tractor maker, later retiring its lime-green paint?
Steiger
Steiger. The lime-green paint went, but the name proved too strong to lose: after a spell off the bonnet it returned as the badge on Case IH's biggest four-wheel-drive tractors.
Q 30Allis-Chalmers' famous 'Persian Orange' tractor paint is said to have been inspired by which flower?
The California poppy
The California poppy. In one telling, tractor boss Harry Merritt saw fields of them and picked the nearest paint; his advertising manager insisted the orange simply carried over from a tractor built for a dealers' group.