Howard's Paraplow wins, four are runners-up.

WHEN I&T first considered sponsoring a competition among small farm equipment manufacturers to recognize innovative designs, we sounded out some opinions. Here are three of them:

"You have a great idea--should have been done long ago. And you're crazy."

"I don't envy you."

"I've been involved in such competitions and I wish you luck."

Despite these foreboding comments, I&T went ahead with the project. The luck that our friend wished us has apparently stayed with us so far. If we're riding for a fall, we haven't seen any bad omens yet.

The idea of recognizing achievement is not new. Business publications in other fields have been conferring awards on companies for their new products for years. The American Society of Agricultural Engineers confers sponsored medals and similar honors to recognize lifetime achievements of its individual members, which is the closest the North American industry has come to honoring the engineering ingenuity that is represented in single products.

They do it overseas. The Royal Agricultural Society of England annually announces winners of medals in advance of its annual Royal Show. In France, the biggest show of them all, the Salon International de la Machine Agricole, has a Committee to Encourage Technical Research which bestows a series of awards. This year, the committee gave out five gold medals, four silvers and 10 special commendations. I&T tries it

So I&T decided in 1983 that it would be appropriate for us to undertake such a project of recognition, at least once, and see how it went. We elected to put it into the form of a competition--submissions to judging--and we thought it would be easy until we set about making our rules.

Immediately we became awash in definitions of what could be called farm and industrial equipment. Crop reporting satellites? Power tools?

But since the idea was to recognize small manufacturers in the first place, the practical solution was to limit the competition to regular members of the Farm Equipment Manufacturers Assn. True, some excellent small companies that make farm and industrial equipment do not belong to this organization, but it is open to all such producers who sell on this continent and almost all its members can be considered small.

Further, FEMA claims that its members are a major source of applied innovations in farm and industrial equipment. This would give them a chance to show their stuff.

We limited the entries: Only one per member; products introduced at retail in North America between July 1, 1983, and June 30, 1984; products or components used in the production of crops or livestock, or for construction, utility work or grounds maintenance.

I&T next recruited judges from among agricultural engineers connected with state agricultural schools. In the spring of 1984, with the blessing of the FEMA board of directors, we mailed entry forms to the group's regular members.

We received entries from about six per cent of FEMA's regular members and a few of these had to be discarded because the product had been introduced outside of the 12-month period.

Were we hoping for lots more? It would have been gratifying to get scores and scores of entries, but since we're new at this business of running an awards competition, this helped make it manageable. It also made the judging less time-consuming. Results

The winner of the competition was Howard Rotavator Co., Muscoda, Wis., for its Paraplow.

There were four runners up:

Accessory Sales, Inc., Kimball, Neb., for its RW Cab Guard precleaner.

Bomford & Evershed Ltd., Salford Priors, England, for its Dyna-Drive rotary cultivator.

Orthman Manufacturing, Inc., Lexington, Neb., for its Tracker Phase II guidance control system.

Walsh Manufacturing Co., Charles City, Ia., for its Tine-Ride sprayer boom.

It was immediately pointed out to the staff of I&T what it already had observed--that the current president of FEMA is also president of the company that won the award. Our reaction was, So what? The competition is I&T's, not FEMA's, and we had opened it to all regular members.

And that's the story of I&T's first venture into handing out recognition to small manufacturers of farm and industrial equipment. A couple of thoughts remain to be mentioned:

The business of farming probably needs innovative designs in its equipment today at least as much as it ever did. The reasons are obvious, dominated by the squeezes on the profitability of farming and the growing awareness that water, soil and energy are going to have to be conserved with ever-increasing intensity.

But there are certain barriers existing today that make it harder than ever to apply technological ingenuity to the business of farming. One is the limited amounts of capital which companies can spend on new product development. Another is the product liability concern.

Manufacturers have told I&T in recent years that they had seen excellent ideas that had to be bypassed because they were advised that the exposure was too great.

Nevertheless, I&T expects new ideas to hit the market in years to come. It's one of the great traditions of a great industry.