Mechanizing the farm: a congress meets in Madrid, 1935

Génie rural, rural engineering, is engineering put to work on the farm and in the countryside: machinery, soil, water and buildings. In 1935 the second international congress on the subject met in Madrid, and the Spanish Republic’s Ministry of Agriculture published this account of how the congress was organised, with the reports presented to it.

The papers are in French, English and German, and they are practical: tables, photographs of tractors and other farm machinery, engineering diagrams and large folding plans. Read now, they give a technical snapshot of how engineers from several countries were approaching the mechanisation of farming in the middle of the decade.

This copy is bound in marbled boards with a leather spine and a red label lettered in gilt; the spine is rubbed and worn at head and foot, and the paper has toned. The large foldouts appear to be present, though the volume has not been collated.