Farm mechanization on an otherwise ‘featureless’ plain: tractors on the Northern Great Plains and immigration policy of the 1920s

Abstract

The 1920s marked the beginning of the diffusion of the gasoline tractor in North American agriculture. The tractor was a labor-saving technology by virtue of its speed of operation, reducing labor input per acre. During the same decade, immigration policies of the USA and Canada diverged sharply. While the USA implemented immigration quotas, Canada admitted large flows of Eastern Europeans, provided their destination was the Prairie West. With the essentially homogeneous nature of the plain on either side of the international border, this divergence in policy sets up a natural experiment that allows us to test the effects of different changes in labor supply on the adoption of labor-saving agricultural technology. We show that although Canadian farmers had earlier adopted tractors at the same rate as farmers in the USA, the relatively slower rate of adoption of the tractor on the Canadian Prairies following the policy divergence can be attributed to Canada’s shift to a more open immigration policy. We conclude that changes to macro-policies can have unexpected consequences as illustrated by this example of tractor diffusion.