That’s a lot of little tractors

A news release that arrived yesterday proclaims that John Deere has just rolled its five millionth lawn tractor off the assembly line. Deere says the first lawn and garden tractor was built in 1963. The first one purchased for use on our ranch, in about 1970, was greeted with much glee by the kids who would be driving it. How cool was that, to be mowing the lawn with a unit that looked similar to the tractors in the field? Way cool. It was a major innovation of the times.
Well, the glee wore off, gently but steadily eroded by miles of lawn mowing. The tractor and mower lasted far, far longer than the glee.
Anyway, five million is a lot of little tractors. I did some figuring. The average length of the new series of lawn and garden tractors is 79 inches. In the evolution of riding mowers, some would have been shorter and perhaps some would be longer, but for the sake of figuring, let’s say the average is 79 inches.

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Five million lawn tractors of that size, lined up nose to tail, would reach 6,155 miles, or 9,910 kilometres.
That’s enough to stretch a line of riding mowers across the entire width of Canada (which is 5,780 miles, or 9,306 km) and have enough tractors left over for another line stretching from Lethbridge to Regina.
And some days, on really big rural lawns, it seems like you’ve actually driven that far!