This is the F-110 model of the two-row checkrow planter produced by the International Harvester Company between 1936 and 1940. Like most pre-war planters, this model was adapted from a horse-drawn design and used the “cross-check row” practice. This practice used a series check-lines which cause trip-levers to activate the seed-drop mechanism, depositing hills of corn in a checkerboard pattern across the field. This method was seen as more amenable to horse-drawn cultivators, and predominated in North America for much of the first half of the twentieth-century.
In many ways, the F-110 model represented the end of an era. While IH would continue to produce checkrow planters up until 1952, the process rapidly being abandoned by then. The post-War period saw the widespread adoption of cheaper and more powerful tractors with the horsepower to pull much larger multi-row planters of the sort that we are more familiar with today.