In the mid 19-teens, smaller lightweight tractors began to appear in the market. Many of these manufactures were less than honest and made claims that to say the least were exaggerated. Many of the machines were unstable, others were prone to rapid wear and mechanical failure or just didn’t have enough power.
The Happy Farmer was one of these early smaller tractors. It was built in La Crosse, Wisconsin by the La Crosse Implement Company for the Happy Farmer Tractor Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Most farmers who bought Happy Farmers were not and the make soon disappeared.
A Nebraska teacher and farmer Wilmot Crozier had bought a couple of lightweight tractors and found them to be so poor that he sponsored a bill which, when passed by the State Legislature in 1920, required that every model tractor sold in the State be tested to insure that farmers would have impartial data on which they could compare performance between makes and models. The University of Nebraska took on the task of performing these tests which are still the standard used today.
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