John Froelich, the oldest son of German immigrants, was born in Iowa in 1849. The grain mill operator tinkered away on a gasoline traction, the tractor, that changed global agriculture.
A small-town American farmboy gave the fight against food insecurity real traction. His name was John Froelich. And he helped feed the world in ways that Bob Geldof, Boy George and a galaxy of other celebrities connected to the holiday hit 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' — including global community efforts to feed the world much, much later in the 1980s — could only imagine.
All it took was American ingenuity, elbow grease — and fossil fuels. Froelich , son of German immigrants, invented the gas-powered tractor. 'He was quite an amazing man,' Denise Schutte, executive director of the Froelich Foundation & Museum in Iowa, told Fox News Digital. 'He had a very creative and inventive sort of mind. He just wanted to make life better for everybody.
Every year at harvest time, he dragged a crew of hired hands and a heavy steam-powered thresher through Iowa and the Dakotas, threshing farmers’ crops for a fee,' according to History.com. The steam-powered machine was cumbersome, hard to maneuver and dangerous. The boiler was fueled by coal, wood — 'just about anything they could burn,' said Schutte. The fire that was needed to power the steam engine was dangerous in a dry field of summer wheat.
One doubtful Illinois farm-equipment company looked at the tractor and 'thought maybe this is the way to go, but maybe not,' said Schutte. 'The company was already known for wonderful plows and different farm implements that were pulled behind horses.' The company founded by John Deere overcame its doubts and purchased Waterloo Gasoline Engine Co. — the tractor company Froelich founded — for $2.1 million in 1918.
American farmers rely on tractors to harvest a third of the entire world’s corn crop, to cite just one example. American corn feeds both humans and livestock and has a variety of industrial uses. Tractors play a central role in American pop culture and politics, too. 'She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,' country singer Kenny Chesney crooned in his 1999 concert sing-along hit; Jason Aldean rode to the top of the country charts with 'My Big Green Tractor' in 2009.
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