The Beginning of Mechanised Agriculture

The arrival of the first tractor on August 12,1918 marked the beginning of mechanised agriculture in Iceland. Thus a new page was turned in the country’s agricultural history. Its buyers were two agriculture enthusiasts from Akranes, merchant and shipowner Þórður Ásmundsson and ship captain Bjarni Ólafsson. The Avery-type tractor, popularly renamed “Akranes tractor”, had a 16 horsepower diesel engine, weighed about 2.5 tons and was 1.5 m wide and 3.5 m long. It hauled three ploughs but could also be made to haul various kinds of harrows or wagons, excavators and stream rollers, and also a potato-harvesting machine. This in fact became the tractor‘s actual role in Akranes where potatoes had been grown for a long time.

Tractors were quite unknown in the Nordic countries before World War I (1914-1918). The old passenger ship Gullfoss transported the Akranes tractor to Iceland. With it was John Sigmundsson, a West-Icelander charged with assembling it. This novel experiment in agricultural mechanisation was at first met with disbelief. The government, the Icelandic Agricultural Society and Althing Parliament had refused to finance the tractor. The first people to use and operate the machine stated with confidence that it had proven to be fast and efficient.