MOULTRIE, Ga. — “I go back to mule days, when I was a boy,” said Colquitt County farmer Louie Perry, who was born in 1939. “I was there when the first tractor came to the farm.”

That first tractor was an Allis-Chalmers model Wc that arrived in the 1940s on the farming operation his family has kept in business since the 1830s. Mules were used in tobacco into Perry’s teens, with the tractor being put to work cultivating and planting corn, cotton and peanuts.

Perry also saw the first mechanical corn harvester. Before its arrival workers picked it by hand. Cotton was hand-picked for years after the arrival of the first tractor.

“All the cotton was pulled by hand,” Perry said. “We had as many as 100 cotton pickers on the farm. The first cotton picked by tractor, daddy hired a guy (with a picker). It made such a mess he stopped him and we picked it by hand.”

The first cotton pickers would pick one row at the time. The tractor was driven backwards and hitched to a truck to catch the picked cotton bolls. Perry gave the first cotton picking head to Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College’s Georgia Museum of Agriculture in Tifton.

The first cotton gin in the area went in at Barwick and was run by a cooperative.

“It would gin 300 bales a year,” Perry said.

The age when tractors would rule the farm were postponed by World War II, when production of tractors was cut so that manufacturers could build the tanks, planes and other equipment needed to fight the Axis powers.

But tractors came into their own in the 1950s. After the war the population began to shift, where before there were about 30 million farmers. At one time in the nation’s history farmers made up probably 90 percent of the U.S. population; now it is less than 2 percent.

With horse power under the hood providing the power of horses and some of the skills that at one time were done by hand, farms grew more efficient and needed fewer laborers.

“The ’50s is when they got to going pretty strong,” Perry said of tractors and other machinery. “When I went to college we had three tractors, all 50 horsepower or less.”

In the early days of tractors the cost could be as little as $400 — still a lot of money in the early 1900s. Today a 115 horsepower John Deere can start in the range of $100,000 and a huge cotton picker can fetch $700,000.

Today the larger farms that have emerged need bigger machines. In addition to getting bigger, just like most people’s phones, tractors are getting smarter.

Using GPS technology, for instance, farmers can plow in the spring — with the tractor steering itself through the field and turned around by the operator at the end of the row. Then at harvest time the tractor can drive itself in the exact same path, increasing the amount of cotton picked.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of farming to the economies of small towns. Merchants in Moultrie can tell when it’s been a bad farm year due to drought or low prices for commodities.

That is one thing that was just the same 100 years ago.

“Farmers didn’t go into town except Saturday,” Perry said. “Now people go into town two or three times a day.”

But on Saturdays the farm community would load up in either a pickup truck or a mule-drawn wagon and park while the riders went exploring and buying supplies.

“They’d stay the whole day,” Perry said. “A treat for me in the old days was to go to Holman’s Mule Barn, because I was always fascinated with horses.”

The mule barn was long vacant when a storm collapsed the facade in 2009. The site was turned into a parking lot for downtown buildings, and now that lot is being renovated as part of a downtown revitalization project.