Tauranga Historical Society: A tractor in Te Puna

Friday, 13 November 2026

A tractor in Te Puna

Anyone who has, as I have, pored through every one of the four-thousand-plus hits in a Papers Past search of the Bay of Plenty Times, will know that there is nothing especially remarkable about Te Puna tractors. These hard-working turners of soil were to be found, by the mid-1930s, everywhere in the Bay of Plenty and across New Zealand.

I have tried hard to discover just how a 1935 McCormick-Deering, model W 12, tractor made its way to a property near the north-western corner of Lochhead Road. Specifically, my cousin Doug Pringle located it in the early 1970’s in a roadside paddock about 250 metres from the turnoff. In the1960s this was Lot 156, Section VIII, Parish of Te Puna - Tuhakaraina land, subsequently much sub-divided and on-sold.

The tractor travelled from Lochhead Road, upper right corner, to Lot 173 on Te Puna Road; and then to Lot 206, Munro Road, lower left-hand corner.

Tauranga County map, image courtesy of Western Bay of Plenty District Council

The steel-wheeled tractor, with its tricksy starter motor (using expensive petrol) that, once the machine was sufficiently warmed up, transitioned to much cheaper kerosene, seems to have been transferred as part of the property, and to have been more and more ignored as time went by. If a separate second-hand sale was ever attempted before 1950, the vendor did not use the Bay of Plenty Times to advertise it. By the time my cousin took an interest in it, it was deep in long grass, speckled with rust and flaked paint, and nothing like the smart example of the same model pictured below. Some of its lugs had come off its steel wheels, giving it, Doug recalls, “a lurching effect to the driver on hard surfaces.”

Doug can no longer remember who gave him the tractor. No doubt because of its lurching ride and aggressive effect on paved roads, it had not moved for a couple years before he asked its owners if he could have it to “understand mechanical things”. Somehow he got it to his family farm on Te Puna Road where he tinkered with it for a bit before leaving home for university. The tractor then enters definite memory: He and my brother Ken loaded it on to the farm’s Bedford truck and transported it along SH 2 to the Sparks farm on Munro Road. There, Ken did some more tinkering and got the machine to move from the implement shed and along the tanker track to the “brooder house” (our parents were in the chicken-rearing business), where it stopped on the verge of Munro Road.

For good. I like to hope that, before it was scrapped, my father consulted another keen tractor man of Te Puna, Rex Williams, to see if he wanted it. Even then, Rex was a collector of old farm machinery and an authority on their continued usefulness. Sadly, neither my dad nor Rex are with us, now, to ask.

Rex Williams and his 1916 steel-wheeled tractor on his Te Puna farm, Snodgrass Road, in 1972.

Image: Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo gcc-21555

The W 12 may have been too ordinary a model for Rex to take an interest in. They were everywhere: light, manoeverable, and simple to operate the manifold had reached a high enough temperature to vaporize the cheaper kerosene from the main tank. Three forward gears (plus reverse), delivering 18 horsepower on its belt and 14 drawbar horsepower through the drawbar. and weighing almost exactly 26 hundredweight (just over 1 ¼ tons), this lightweight tractor was extremely well suited to Te Puna’s free-draining soils and small farm units, and – as my cousin and brother discovered – could be made to work even after very neglectful treatment.

I found a poignant advertisement in the Bay of Plenty Times of 3 July 1937 [1]. Mr F. D. Donovan of Paengaroa, having sold his farm, was offering, among the implements and other stock:

16-yr. Draught Gelding,

1 7-yr. Draught Gelding,

1 Aged Heavy Draught Gelding,

1 McCormick Deering W12 Tractor.

At the time, prices for second-hand tractors were in the region of £250- 300. Negotiating the sale of a horse was (and always has been) a job for an expert. There are no ‘typical’ prices to compare the animal horsepower on Donovan’s farm with that of the tractor’s. I somehow doubt, however, that the horse team would have made the same price as the machine.

Sam Snowden’s 1938 advertisement for a different model of McCormick-Deering (the closely-aligned position of the front wheels, for instance). But note the choice on offer of steel or rubber wheels. Rubber tyres became more and more popular as tractors were put to more and more purposes.

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19380921.2.29.1

The emphasis placed on agricultural mechanisation was a consequence of manpower shortages during and after WW I, and was taken especially seriously after WW II [2]. Federated Farmers, furiously lobbying for the use of scant overseas funds for imports important to them, offered Peter Fraser’s Labour government hard evidence [3] of the productivity gains to be had:

Evidence from the Federation will consist of the tractor and machinery survey now being concluded. That survey commenced in April and has entailed a tremendous amount of work but the result has been approximately 15,000 detailed statements from farmers setting out the type of tractor or equipment needed and an estimation of the increased production possible by the use of that machinery. Every farmer who originally notified the federation of his tractor and machinery needs has been written to individually concerning increased production. On a special form, 15,000 replies have now been received setting out in detail estimated increase in butterfat production, lambs, ewes, store sheep, supplementary crops and cereals. Many replies show that additional land would be brought into production if the necessary machinery was available.

The fate of our particular Te Puna tractor remains unknown. But the charm has lingered on. Few children’s playgrounds of the late twentieth century were without an immobilized tractor to clamber over; to drive, in the imagination, over ridge and gully; and to pretend to be a grown-up with a lot of mechanised horsepower under your seat.