Tractor Wars
John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture
by Neil Dahlstrom
It is the earliest days of introducing mechanized farming and early “players” each have an intense desire to succeed. In reality the title of this book could easily have been written Tractor War$. Who were those players?
One pair was International Harvesters’ Alexander Legge and Bert Benjamin, another William Butterworth and Theopolis (Theo) Brown of John Deere, and the third none other than Henry Ford.
Henry Ford fired the first salvo as sales of his Fordson tractor dropped off as others brought out more sophisticated machines. He dropped the selling price 22% to $620 and when that wasn’t enough, he dropped it still further to $325. Sure, farmers were thrifty but they also noticed the competition—especially the machines of International Harvester and John Deere—were rapidly improving technologically thus making their machines more useful by far than the Fordson.
The tractor wars were barely underway when real war intervened in the form of World War I. But, they quickly resumed once that conflict was over. By that time too, “the farm equipment industry had gone through a significant rite of passage . . . as consolidations and product standards began to separate manufacturers . . . the field of viable manufacturers was narrowing.” And buyers, or more correctly potential buyers, were becoming better educated and thus seeking, “Reliable starting, steady engine performance, a hardened crankcase, the protection of parts from dirt, and prevention from overheating.”
The first Fordson tractor produced and seen in this photo Henry Ford had shipped to his friend, botanist Luther Burbank. Although once he’d looked the tractor over, Burbank is said to have remarked, “Just like Ford, all motor and no frame.”
Farmers in particular were hard hit by the prevailing recessionary conditions of the early 1920s even as Henry Ford continued to sell his tractors “for less than any competitor . . . As the future state of the tractor industry grew increasingly volatile, engineers at International Harvester and John Deere focused on the development of new models that, in time, would deal a significant blow to Ford’s tightening grip on the American farm.”
A model N Waterloo Boy is displayed at the August 1918 farm equipment show in Salina, Kansas by parent company John Deere.
The author’s path to writing Tractor Wars was as unexpected by him as his approach to telling of the early days of what today really is an industry. More often it is told from a single company’s perspective, a history of that company, its people and the equipment it developed and marketed. That makes Neil Dahlstrom’s approach all the more interesting and refreshing. It took him five years to research as he needed to understand—and document as his chapter endnotes and extensive bibliography attest—the entire industry from a business perspective while also taking into account and relating the prevailing economic and societal conditions.
Dahlstrom is well able too as since but a young lad he loved history and its artifacts, volunteering at local museums. Then he carefully selected his schools and classes for he wanted to work as an archivist. It’s just that he never expected to be working as the archivist at John Deere located literally a few doors from the house where he’d grown up.
Plowing with an International Harvester McCormick-Deering model 10-20 somewhere in Wisconsin in 1923.
Following earning his masters he’d gone to work in Alexandria, Virginia documenting the history of the commercial space industry. Not really anxious to return home, he’d only applied to Deere when the archivist position opened up. Once hired, Dahlstrom was elated to discover what a really rich archive Deere has, having established that function in 1976 and actively supported it since.
This book is Dahlstrom’s third and it is eloquently and eruditely written. The only disappointment is the poor quality of nearly all the images used to illustrate Tractor Wars making it a bit of a challenge to find one example from each of the three main companies, (John Deere, Fordson, and International Harvester’s McCormick-Deering) in order to photograph page pairs with which to illustrate these comments. Your commentator found it surprising in that the overall production and presentation of the book is very good.
That observation is not meant to detract from the book’s purpose nor does it. Dahlstrom’s motivation in researching and writing was to shed light on “the origins of these machines, why they came into being, the people behind them . . . and what were the contextual drivers because after all, businesses can only operate in a larger political, social, and economic climate . . . Today most of the world does not know where their food comes from . . . because a small percentage of the population feeds the entire world.” This book then admirably recounts that birth of modern agriculture.
Copyright 2024 Helen V Hutchings (speedreaders.info)
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