BROOKINGS, S.D. (KELO) — SDSU’s Quarter Scale Tractor Team drove home with an international title.

Building a tractor is no easy task, but students at SDSU not only built a 1/4 scale tractor, but they were named the 2022 international champions at the Student Design Competition this past weekend. They competed against universities from across the country and Canada.

Ty Grone has been a member of the quarter scale tractor team for the past 5 years. He puts in around 40 hours a week working on the machine with the team.

“It’s quite the process, I know beginning of the year it’s a lot of design process, a lot of talking to team members on and off, will this work, will this not work,” said Grone.

Over the course of just two semesters, students go from having an engine and back wheels, to having a complete tractor.

“Ideally, we would like to design all the way through the fall and then manufacture all the way through the spring, but depending on the year, those kind of mesh together,” said Grone.

“It’s fully dependent on us as students to design and engineer and fabricate the tractor and build it and in there we do different competitions from pulling to durability, movability, as well as different report writing and market presentations,” said Parker Aase, team member.

This year, all their hard work paid off. They were named the international champions at the 2022 ASABE student design competition.

“I would like to say we really went in there saying we were going to win the whole time, but we were hoping for a decent size finish, so when I say we were speechless when we won, we were literally speechless,” said Aase.

“It was great, we’ve done it in the past. This year we knew we had a pretty good team and a pretty good tractor to compete,” said Douglas Prairie, instructor and faculty coordinator for the 1/4 scale tractor team.”

“It’s been a bow on top of everything to finish my time here with a international champion tractor,” said Grone.

The team has placed second multiple times at the competition, but the last time they were international champions was in 2018.