I have always had a dream. It’s a silly thing really. Call me a sentimental fool but just once I would like to circle the barnyard with a tractor with power steering.
I am named after an ancestor, Daniel Massey, who laboured in a small forge in Newcastle, Ontario, in the1840s. He pounded out sturdy farm implements for the community for decades. His son Hart took over the business, bought several patents from various inventors and went on to build factories in Brantford and later Toronto where he fabricated ploughs, cultivators, seed drills and finally the reaper-binder that was described as “the world’s greatest harvesting machine” at the Exposition Universelle in 1889 in Paris. Queen Victoria used exclusively Massey machinery on her estates. So did Napoleon III. Hart’s last act was to build Massey Hall on Shuter Street in Toronto, a place where he could hear the organ music he so loved.
After Hart died in 1896, his third son, my great-grandfather Walter, became president of the company. He travelled the world, setting up Massey outlets in South Africa, Australia and finally, in the Punjab in India which is home to some of the oldest agriculture on the planet.
Like me, Walter bolted from the city and bought a farm. In his case the farm was 6 miles east of Toronto’s Old City Hall, on the westside of Don Valley. He used it as a laboratory for the company and embarked on a series of firsts. He introduced pasteurized milk to the country, was the first Canadian to take moving pictures and the first to run an electric toy train. Unfortunately for the family, Walter drank a glass of bad water on a business trip to Ottawa in 1901 and died of typhoid three weeks later at the age of thirty-seven. He was working on a process for machine-wrapped bread when he died.
The Masseys did not invent anything. They bought the rights to other peoples’ inventions. And they never made a tractor, apart from the giant Sawyer Massey steam engines that powered the early threshing machines. It wasn’t until the family sold the company that Massey finally produced the General Purpose tractor in 1930.
My wife was born into a John Deere family and I took her name, so to speak. Just after we were married I bought a couple of ancient two-cylinder green machines from the 1950s. At the time, my neighbor Hughie scolded me and said I should have got a MF-135. “It would do a lot more for you, including power steering.” He was right of course. I have struggled with arm-strong steering ever since.
But last year I saw an ad on Kijiji for an MF-135 with the 3-cylinder Perkins diesel engine, just an hour’s drive away. The owner, a young man named Dilweer, was obviously sad to say goodbye to his tractor. But he had student debt to pay off and his gravel truck needed a new engine. He told me he had bought the tractor for sentimental reasons. His grandfather, who he was very fond of, had farmed with one in the Punjab, the Land of Five Rivers. I told him my great-grandfather had first taken the Massey name to India in the 1890s and he shook his head in wonderment at the strange connection we had. Massey is still one of the most popular manufacturers in that country. On the way home with the tractor, I stopped beside two truck drivers in purple turbans who waved at me excitedly. “You have the Massey 135!” they shouted.
“Punjab!” I replied and they nodded and grinned. I got the machine home and found I needed a hydraulic diverter valve to install a loader on it. I dropped in on Charlie in the parts department at Shantz Farm Equipment down in Alma and found the mere mention of the 135 brought several guys my age out of the back to offer advice and talk about farming with their dads on this tractor. Wherever I go, the 135 melts the ice and starts a conversation.
Dilweer promised me he is coming to visit and to do a few laps of the barnyard with the new loader. He hopes to farm someday himself, like his grandfather. If my boys decide they don’t want this tractor when I croak I will be sure to instruct my executors to give Dilweer the first refusal.