Two recent trends identified in northern Ghanaian agriculture in recent years are the widespread uptake of tractor services by smallholder farmers and the emergence of a significant sector of medium-scale farmers using modern inputs and mechanisation. The paper explores the linkages between these two factors, the extent to which these are responses to favourable market factors, the accessibility of the market to smallholder farmers and the emergence of medium scale farmers investing in mechanisation and using surplus capacity to provide services to smallholders, or the extent to which they represent a process of increasing social differentiation in which the emergence of middle farmers represents unequal access to farm inputs, technologies and information, in which smallholders experience difficulty in gaining access to inputs and ploughing services. The paper also investigates the relationship between uptake of ploughing services, availability of farm labour and environmental conditions with a focus on the soil. Finally, since the promotion of tractor ploughing and the rise of commercial farming are not new (for instance their presence formed the basis for Lipton’s theory of Urban Bias and for debates about agricultural populism and social differentiation in agriculture during the 1980s) the paper examines the historical antecedents of state supported commercial agriculture and ploughing services and their influences on the present.