Tractor Factor

It’s a crisp afternoon in February. Ashen clouds feather the sky above the university’s East Campus, and fresh snow paints the half-mile track outside Splinter Labs. Barring, say, an unforeseen global pandemic, nearly every new make and model of farm tractor sold in the United States will crawl its way around come spring, towing a train of heavy machinery and instrumentation behind it, every action and reaction measured and recorded and published free online for consumers the world over. Inside, Georgia-native Roger Hoy, director of the Nebraska Tractor Test Lab, stands beside a hulking steel apparatus, something called a dynamometer, speaking a foreign language in dad sneakers and tired Levi's. A poetry of peak torque and partial throttle, of RPMs and PTO.

“We spend an hour at rated engine speed, which is normally where the PTO claim is made. We take the average one-hour ratings to determine the power. We do a lug run — basically what power the tractor can create at each rpm fully loaded — at 50 rpm increments…,” he says, arms crossed and swaying on his heels. He’s on autopilot, the protocol so deeply ingrained after 14 years at the helm he can recite it like the Pledge of Allegiance. “Somewhere in that curve we find out where peak torque exists and we figure out where the max power condition is, so we might run another hour at maximum power, and then we have about 18 partial-throttle, partial-load points we run to give the whole map of performance.”

Come July, the Nebraska Tractor Test Lab will celebrate its 100th anniversary. One hundred years of consumer protection. One hundred years of cooperation with the world’s leading tractor manufacturers. One hundred years of keeping the industry accountable, one tractor at a time, more than 2,200 tractors total. When the lab closed down temporarily in spring due to COVID-19, it was just the second time in its sterling run and the first since WWII, when tractor manufacturers halted production of new models.

And if the recent debut of a new ice cream flavor at the UNL Dairy Store — Tractor Test Toffee — isn’t enough to convince you of the significance, consider this: Nebraska’s test lab was the first and only independent tractor testing facility in the western hemisphere. One hundred years later, it still is. “It’s maybe not famous to the general population, but within the field,” Hoy says, “it’s a real star in the constellation of agriculture.”

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