Testing began on East Campus a century ago and keeps on rolling
By Carson Vaughan ('10)
It’s a crisp afternoon in February. Ashen clouds feather the sky above the university’s East Campus, and fresh snow paints the half-mile track outside Splinter Labs. Barring, say, an unforeseen global pandemic, nearly every new make and model of farm tractor sold in the United States will crawl its way around come spring, towing a train of heavy machinery and instrumentation behind it, every action and reaction measured and recorded and published free online for consumers the world over. Inside, Georgia-native Roger Hoy, director of the Nebraska Tractor Test Lab, stands beside a hulking steel apparatus, something called a dynamometer, speaking a foreign language in dad sneakers and tired Levi's. A poetry of peak torque and partial throttle, of RPMs and PTO.
“We spend an hour at rated engine speed, which is normally where the PTO claim is made. We take the average one-hour ratings to determine the power. We do a lug run — basically what power the tractor can create at each rpm fully loaded — at 50 rpm increments…,” he says, arms crossed and swaying on his heels. He’s on autopilot, the protocol so deeply ingrained after 14 years at the helm he can recite it like the Pledge of Allegiance. “Somewhere in that curve we find out where peak torque exists and we figure out where the max power condition is, so we might run another hour at maximum power, and then we have about 18 partial-throttle, partial-load points we run to give the whole map of performance.”
Come July, the Nebraska Tractor Test Lab will celebrate its 100th anniversary. One hundred years of consumer protection. One hundred years of cooperation with the world’s leading tractor manufacturers. One hundred years of keeping the industry accountable, one tractor at a time, more than 2,200 tractors total. When the lab closed down temporarily in spring due to COVID-19, it was just the second time in its sterling run and the first since WWII, when tractor manufacturers halted production of new models.
And if the recent debut of a new ice cream flavor at the UNL Dairy Store — Tractor Test Toffee — isn’t enough to convince you of the significance, consider this: Nebraska’s test lab was the first and only independent tractor testing facility in the western hemisphere. One hundred years later, it still is. “It’s maybe not famous to the general population, but within the field,” Hoy says, “it’s a real star in the constellation of agriculture.”
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On Feb. 11, 1919, Nebraska’s capitol building was electric, the House gallery overflowing. They had come — the Germans from Russia, the Danish Lutherans, the Bohemians and the Jews — to protest the Siman Act, a blatantly xenophobic bill that aimed to outlaw foreign languages in both public and private schools. But Rep. Wilmot Crozier, a Democrat and 35-year-old farmer from Osceola, had something else on his mind that rainy afternoon — something else catalyzed, ultimately, by the war. He was thinking about tractors, had been for years now, how the damn things never seemed to work as advertised, how too many were marooned in Nebraska farmyards at that very moment, how the wrinkles in his bill to regulate the industry had been ironed out in committee and would pass through to final reading that very afternoon barring any unforeseen hiccups. He didn’t have a dog in the language fight — not publicly, anyhow — but he had a captive audience regardless, and now he had the floor.
“For the benefit of a crowded gallery, an extravagant program of oratory was carried out,” The Nebraska State Journal reported. “There was little real opposition to the bill, but supporters took occasion to defend it as tho [sic] the very life were at stake.”
Less than a year earlier, Crozier had read an editorial in Nebraska Farmer by C.W. Pugsley, soon to become assistant secretary of agriculture under President Warren Harding, claiming that “irresponsible concerns are manufacturing tractors merely to sell and not to run.” A graduate of Northwestern University, Crozier understood the matter all too well. After passing his U.S. Civil Service Exam and serving for four years as a division superintendent for the Bureau of Education in the Philippines, he returned to the family farm near Osceola. Since then, he’d watched as the horse and mule gave way to steam traction and eventually internal combustion engines, had “followed many a queer-looking contraption around the demonstration fields,” he later wrote, and he’d begun to invest in the technology himself. “That is,” he added, “I invested in the cheapest one that had wheels.”
He first purchased a new Ford Model B, manufactured not by the famous automaker, but a Minneapolis company attempting to capitalize on the name’s cache. Neither this nor its replacement, both “excuses for tractors,” he wrote, worked as advertised. They frequently broke down, and when they did, both service technicians and spare parts were scarce. Only when he finally acquired a Rumely Oil Pull from the Advance-Rumely Company of La Porte, Ind., was Crozier finally satisfied, and now corresponding with Pugsley, he began to wonder if there wasn’t a way — in this new era of power farming — to protect farmers from fraudulent claims. Nearly 165,000 tractors were sold in 1918, compared to just 14,000 four years earlier.
“If there ever was a need for a metaphorical yardstick,” he wrote, “it is found when you get into the tractor game.”
And thus Wilmot Flint Crozier, a fluid conversationalist with a steady gaze and thick black eyebrows, rose to the defense of a bill that needed none: the Nebraska Tractor Test Law, one of the first consumer-protection bills in the country, and one that would influence farmers worldwide.
“The farmer has always protested against certain practices in the tractor business, but he has protested singly,” he later wrote. “Now he speaks with a voice that, at least, is being given attention."
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The Nebraska Tractor Test Law sailed through the House two days after Crozier’s grand opus with just two dissenting votes. It required all tractors sold in Nebraska to pass inspection by engineers at the University of Nebraska, and also that replacement parts be made readily available within the state, assigning enforcement duties to the state railway commission. (Enforcement duties were transferred to the Nebraska Department of Agriculture in 1967.) The law was punishable by a fee of no less than $100 and no more than $500 for each offense. Whether Crozier knew it or not, both North Dakota and Missouri were considering similar legislation at the time. Both dropped the matter when Crozier’s passed, content to draft behind Nebraska’s leadership.
“The eyes of the agricultural engineering world are now on this state,” wrote The Nebraska State Journal later that year.
Crozier’s bill was unique as legislation, but tractor testing itself was hardly a new idea. Up and down the Great Plains, from Canada to Texas, tractor trials flourished in the early 20th century as the technology rapidly improved. The events drew thousands to a carnival atmosphere — watermelon feeds, coronation balls, dog shows, cannon fire — providing both a showcase for tractor manufacturers and a trial run for prospective buyers. Many of the “demonstration fields” upon which Crozier followed all those “queer-looking contraptions,” in fact, were likely an hour east of his farm in Fremont, then home to the largest tractor show in the world. All day long throughout the weeklong event, hundreds of tractors assembled by dozens of manufacturers simultaneously plowed hundreds of acres. Roughly 60,000 people attended the event in 1916, including Henry Ford, who brought his son and his orchestra and introduced the first Fordson tractors, still then in the experimental stage.
By the time Crozier and his friend Charles Warner, a state senator, drafted the Nebraska Tractor Test Law, the shows were dying down — tractors no longer a novelty and the dealers more easily accessible — but the marketing had ballooned and the fraudulent claims ran wild. When the bill was enacted that July, the Board of Regents assigned testing duties to the Department of Agricultural Engineering, a pioneer among American universities, chaired by L.W. Chase, who had previously served as a referee for the annual plowing trials in Winnipeg.
A half-mile cinder track and temporary building were soon erected on UNL’s East Campus, and with the input of both farmers and the manufacturers themselves — one of many goodwill gestures that kept the industry supportive — the new testing board approved the inspection guidelines. Among them were assessments for horsepower, endurance, fuel consumption and more. It was a “stupendous task,” Chase told the Lincoln Sunday Star, and one that required no small amount of innovation by his three-man team. To keep the process as autonomous as possible, and therefore eschew any human error or bias, a first-of-its-kind dynamometer car was frankensteined together using an electrical generator mounted to a three-speed tractor chassis in place of the engine, the whole unit pulled by a traction dynamometer. One could then adjust the load by increasing the generator’s current.
“At first it was taken for granted that the large manufacturing concerns would be opposed,” according to The Nebraska State Journal when the testing first began. “But this is not so. Large manufacturers hail with joy a means by which the soundness and efficiency of their products can be tested.”
By the end of 1919, Chase had received applications from 42 companies for a total of 86 different models. The first complete test was conducted on a John Deere Waterloo Boy Model N 12-25 in the spring of 1920, and now, 100 years later, the Nebraska Tractor Test Lab remains the standard bearer for tractor testing worldwide.
“A really interesting thing happened. As soon as we started testing, the disreputable manufacturers were pretty much weeded out right away, and the reputable manufacturers remained,” says tractor lab director Hoy, also a professor of biological systems engineering at UNL. “Their marketing departments started competing on the test results in Nebraska, and that goes on to this day.”
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Though its mission has never budged, the Nebraska Tractor Test Lab has evolved considerably over 100 years. Once free for the manufacturer, each test now costs roughly $24,000. Engineers have come and gone. Directors, too. The original cinder track was upgraded to cement in 1956, and widened from 15 to 22 feet in 2007 to accommodate the growing models. In 1980, the lab moved from its original building to the new Splinter Labs behind it. Keeping pace with the latest technology, the dynamometer car has been updated multiple times, and the lab has introduced new tests for everything from emissions to the noise levels inside the cab. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, levels above 85 decibels can damage hearing.
“So that immediately became a number to compete on,” Hoy says. “Nowadays, you get in a cab-equipped tractor, you might well be at 67 or 68 decibels. I don’t want to say we were all that caused equipment to become quieter, but I do think we were maybe a catalyst.”
"The test lab existed originally because of the law, but I think the real reason it continues to exist is because it's just had an unparalleled reputation for reporting the datavery objectively and very honestly."
Roger Hoy, Ph.D.
In 1986, the law was amended again to align Nebraska’s test codes with those of the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development; essentially, to prevent unnecessary double testing for manufacturers hoping to sell outside the United States. The OECD, a 36-member intergovernmental economic group based in Paris, had begun testing tractors in the 1970s, using codes partially developed by none other than Lester Larsen, chief engineer of the Nebraska lab from 1946 to 1975 and a luminary in the field. So when Nebraska adopted the OECD procedures, it was in many ways chasing its own tail. Today, the lab on East Campus is also the OECD’s only designated North American testing station.
“It’s allowed the manufacturers’ input to come into the OECD schemes, because most of the other designated authorities around the world are governmental institutions,” says Hoy, who formerly worked for John Deere’s Product Engineering Center. “So manufacturers don’t really have a voice at the table except for the United States, and I think that’s made the testing codes all the better from having that input.”
When the development of a new tractor nears completion and the marketing campaign is all but ready to launch, the manufacturer sends a copy of both the operating manual and any printed advertising material to the test lab. Once the test is scheduled, the manufacturer can apply for a temporary sales permit, allowing them to begin distribution immediately. Depending on the number of models already scheduled, however, this window can last up to a year and half, and moving forward in the meantime is a risk — if the tractors don’t perform as advertised, they’re bound by Nebraska law to modify every unit already sold until it either complies with the advertising or satisfies the customer. When the weather cooperates and both the tractor and testing facility are running properly, each test takes roughly three days, and unless the manufacturer chooses to withdraw from testing, the final report is published online.
“The test lab existed originally because of the law, but I think the real reason it continues to exist is because it’s just had an unparalleled reputation for reporting the data very objectively and very honestly,” Hoy says. “We don’t play favorites here.”
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But occasionally, the lab is forced to defend itself. In the mid-1990s, the Iowa-Nebraska Equipment Dealers Association began lobbying state senators to repeal Crozier’s law, claiming it unfairly limited both the marketplace for Nebraska farmers and sales opportunities for Nebraska dealers. The group finally found a senator willing to sponsor the bill in 2003, but the grassroots pushback was immediate. More than 1,800 people signed a petition supporting the test lab, most of them members of agricultural groups like Grange, the Farmers Union and the American Corn Growers Association. But the real nail in the coffin, Hoy says, was “one heck of an editorial” by columnist Charlene Fink in Farm Journal. Without the law in place, she claimed, none of the tractor companies would voluntarily pay for testing. In fact, most had confidentially told her so.
“Many things have changed in the industry since 1920, but one thing hasn’t: Farmers in Nebraska — and every state — deserve to have independent tractor testing to prove that the machines do what manufacturers claim they do,” she wrote. “The more consolidated and competitive the tractor business becomes, the more important objective testing is to the buyer.”
Suddenly Nebraska’s state senators were flooded with letters not just from Nebraska, but all over the world. “That kind of turned it off,” Hoy says, at least for a while, though every few years the dealers association would return, and Hoy would find himself defending the lab before another legislative committee. Finally, in 2012, a bipartisan group hammered out a compromise, raising the permit threshold from 40 to 100 horsepower tractors, while simultaneously stripping tax exemption from every untested tractor, regardless of horsepower.
But the question remains: can the lab survive without the law? Would it? “I don’t really know,” Hoy says. “We didn’t want to test that.”
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The original building — deemed a historic landmark by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in 1980 — huddles just up the sidewalk from Splinter Labs, its stucco exterior white as the snowy evergreens in the parking lot. Inside: the history of all that horsepower, more than 40 antique models on display, polished and gleaming in the spotlight, from the original Ford tractors that fooled farmers like Crozier to the Rumely Oil-Pull that reaffirmed his faith in the technology. Named for the former chief engineer, the Lester Tractor Museum was officially certified by the Board of Regents in 1998, two years before his death, incorporating many of the tractors from his own collection.
It’s a quiet museum, even more so in winter when the lab is on hiatus. Regardless, former board president Don Edwards sits inside, waiting for the next visitor. Once the dean of UNL’s College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources and an emeritus professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering, he’s perhaps the most overqualified museum docent in the state. He speaks the lingo, too, understands Hoy at peak torque and full throttle. Tractor testing is, by nature, inside baseball, but together they possess incredible fuel efficiency when approached by an unwitting observer: just one or two questions, and they’ll run for hours.
“This is the original building, so when they talk about needing a bigger space, it’s like, ‘Don’t mess with it — just rotate ’em!’ ” Edwards says after Hoy heads back to the lab. “But there’s so much history in here also. This represents WWI, the Depression, WWII, the gasoline-kerosene era. How did John Deere come to be? Why is John Deere green and yellow? It’s all right here. That’s why we always like the opportunity to show people through here, because yeah, you can walk through and see all the tractors. And yeah, you can see all the names and all that…”
Edwards pauses for just a moment, head swiveling to survey the room. There’s a glimmer in his eye, like an archaeologist standing before the Acropolis. “But the stories that go with them are just incredible.”