This industrial film footage captures the manufacturing process for the Graham-Hoeme chisel plow at the company's factory in Amarillo, Texas. All stages of production are captured, from forging, soldering, and assembly to blueprint sketching and loading onto trucks. The film portrays the technology used to build the plows as well as the workers that ran the machines. It also includes footage of the finished product in use on a farm.

Touted as “the plow that saved the Plains,” the Graham-Hoeme Chisel Plow helped control the effects of wind erosion during the seven-year drought of the 1950s. William Thurman Graham began manufacturing the machinery in Amarillo in 1938. After finding that standard tandem-disc plows left turned land flat, Graham was one of two Amarillo-based manufacturing companies that developed chisel plows with spring shanks that left crop residue on the surface, thereby reducing the risk of wind erosion.

Touted as “the plow that saved the Plains,” the Graham-Hoeme Chisel Plow helped control the effects of wind erosion during the seven-year drought of the 1950s. Standard tandem-disc plows left turned land flat, while chisel plows with spring shanks like the Graham-Hoeme left crop residue on the soil surface. The process reduced the risk of wind erosion and increased water storage. Fred Hoeme of Hooker, Oklahoma, developed the heavy-duty machinery in 1933. William Thurman Graham of Amarillo, Texas, purchased the manufacturing and distribution rights five years later, opening a factory in his hometown. The plant’s 400 employees produced between 5,000 and 8,000 plows annually between 1947 and 1955. The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers erected a permanent marker celebrated the plow as a Historic Landmark of Agricultural Engineering in 2000.

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