You see this sign a lot in the country outside Toronto:
Now I like farmers as much as the next guy, but whenever I see this, I always want to grab a sharpie and scribble on it “Cities Build Tractors!”
In Due Course
Building the Republic of Letters, one keystroke at a time
Me too, but it turns out that nowadays tractors are built in industrial parks on the outskirts of small towns. As far as I can tell from a bit of googling, North American farm equipment production is now concentrated in midwestern US towns like Jackson Minnesota (pop. 3,300), Hesston Kansas (pop. 3,700) and East Moline Illinois (pop. 21,300, which, to be fair is part of metropolitan Moline, an actual city of over 380,000). MF used to build an awful lot of tractors in Toronto, on the spot where the Liberty Village condo development stands now. I suppose some of those condo dwellers work for firms that provide financial services to farmers and to the companies that own the companies that own the companies that build tractors. And of course cities produce media content consumed by farmers.