Tractor wars
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Jodi:
We take for granted the tractors that we have now. You can go out and plow, disc, plant, how many acres in just a few hours, and that wasn't the case, of course, over a hundred years ago, but what gave you the idea to start writing this book and do the research?
Neil:
It was not something I set out to do. As someone who does research, essentially for a living, it's really hard to go out and find a topic, because a lot of things have to fall into place. You've got to have a good idea. You have to have good story, compelling characters. There's got to be information. There's got to be content, and I spent a lot of years looking for the next book or the next story and kind of gave up on it because you get 10 pages in and run out of content.
Neil:
And so, this is a story. For me it started, we were working on the 100th anniversary of the John Deere tractor in 2018. You start doing research, and you get sucked into stories that you know and people tell you about. I kept just putting things off to the side, and it was things like this ongoing idea that William Butterworth, John Deere's CEO, was opposed to the tractor, and I thought, "That doesn't seem right to me, because John Deere introduced a tractor. How do you do that with the CEO being in opposition to it?"
Neil:
It didn't make sense, but I didn't know enough about it, and so it was really just those questions start to pile up, and so you start doing research, and I was probably two and a half years into research, well after 2018, where I said, "You know what? This may actually be a book." So, it didn't start off as a book. It just started out as curiosity.
Jodi:
And curiosity certainly led to a fascinating read with a whole lot of detail. As an historian, you also know what was going on in the country at the time all this started. What was going on at the time when the idea of a horseless machine came to mind?
Neil:
There was an awful lot going on, and you're right. For me, context is so important because it drives decisions. You don't make decisions in a vacuum. In the United States, the introduction of the model T, it reminds me the .com bubble of the 1990s, or even now, with electric vehicles. Everyone wanted to be in on the automobile business, and everyone was trying to do it from tinkerers in their garage to big manufacturers, while Henry Ford introduces the Model T in 1908 and changes everything. So now, people have mobility. They can afford a vehicle. You can go on vacations and road trips. You see increased visitation in national parts and the development of tourism, all of these things. You have mobility. I can move to the city now.
Neil:
Then you throw under the mix, World War I, and how that impacts people, the Spanish Flu in 1918 and how that impacts just daily life. One of the great stories for me was in Moline and reading in the newspapers about the end of the war and how people were out in their automobiles driving around. There were parades and celebrations, but also, there were restricted times of when you could do it because there were mask mandates, and I was looking around going, "What?" So, all of these-
Jodi:
What goes around comes around.
Neil:
Yeah, exactly, and so all of these things happen, and they all impact the introduction, new technology, which is what the farm tractor was.
Jodi:
And Ford said, and this is his quote from your book, "Nothing could be more inexcusable than the average farmer, his wife, and their children drudging from early morning until late at night." Is that what spurred him to start the thing we know now as the tractor?
Neil:
It did. He was really driven by this idea of being efficient, and he thought anything that can be converted from human or animal power to mechanical power should be done, and there's no excuse not to do it. He saw a steam engine on wheels when he was 12 and was fascinated by it, and he's someone who grew up on the farm, so he knew it was like to do the work, and he combined that with mechanical aptitude and ability, and of course, you got to be very visionary. You surround yourself with the right people, but he would talk about how farmers just follow their traditions, and you would just hire more people automatically. You wouldn't even consider another option. You'd just hire more people to do the work.
Jodi:
Well, and then farmers, they're kind of like, "What? Nothing's going to replace the horse." At the turn of the 20th century, the average farm was smaller than 50 acres, so what was going on in farmers' minds at that time, when Ford was starting to develop his thoughts about mechanizing the field?
Neil:
This concept of a small tractor for the average farm was really revolutionary. Again, there are a number of companies that were working on it. It was all experimental. When Ford sent his photo of an experimental tractor to the Farm Implement News in 1908, that was only a month after the debut of model T, so no one had ever heard of Henry Ford yet, and so it was kind of like, "Yep, here's another one," but it wasn't until 1913 with the debut of a tractor, called the Bull, that one called it the ‘gorgeous nightmare period’, which is okay, cheap, small tractor, similar to an inexpensive Model T that everyone could afford, because Henry Ford hadn't actually built a tractor yet. That changed everything. The Bull changed everything, and now, new companies, entrepreneurs, mechanics, companies like Deere or International Harvester are going, "Okay, there's something here. Now there's something maybe we can develop." So, it really changed everything.
Jodi:
What did Ford's first tractor do? And what was it made of? I mean, it had to have been pretty rudimentary.
Neil:
Yeah, it was fairly rudimentary. The experimental versions, they were made of mostly automobile parts from previous cars. The Model T wasn't Henry Ford's first car. He had been in the business for six or seven years and just didn't really... He was doing okay, but not great, so he was using wheels off of grain binders and the steering wheel off an old automobile and just putting together different parts, and the whole goal was, you were going to plow. These early tractors were built for plowing. The predecessor were steam traction engines and then these huge gasoline powered tractors that were used on the Western prairies or the Canadian prairies that are... They weigh 20,000 pounds. Well, now, you're looking at tractors that weigh 3,000 or 4,000 pounds. They're small. They're maybe 12 horsepower, but they're built to plow, essentially, do some light tillage work, and that's where you start to see just different versions of it.
Jodi:
And it was enough that you had Cyrus McCormick, of International Harvester, taking note and they thought, "Hmm."
Neil:
Yeah. Really, before Henry Ford came along, International Harvester was the leader in the tractor industry. But, even when John Deere's board voted to get into the tractor business in 1912, it's an industry that's sold 10,000 machines a year, so it was small. There's less than a dozen manufacturers, and that's this really exciting period in the 19-teens, where the industry goes from a handful of manufacturers to 150 manufacturers 10 years later, from total production of 10,000 a year to 150,000 a year. It escalates very, very quickly. It doesn't mean that most of them are any good. It doesn't mean that most of them work, but there's a lot of them. That's this gorgeous nightmare period where it's like, okay, it's free for all.
Jodi:
Yeah, and some of them were making fraudulent claims and everything like that, so that kind of brings us to Fremont, Nebraska, where we had a national tractor demonstration in 1916. Was that the year it started?
Neil:
It started a few years before, but 1916 was really the seminal year. It's a series of tractor demonstrations that start in Dallas, Texas, ends in Madison, Wisconsin a few months later, but Fremont, Nebraska in August is when Henry Ford shows up with a couple of his tractors to demonstrate. Henry Ford Day draws anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people. A lot of them are there just to see Henry Ford, because he's a worldwide celebrity at this point, but there's over a hundred tractors in the field.
Neil:
This is a time where you've never seen a tractor. I mean, most people have never, and I think that's hard for us to imagine. Most people have never seen one. You read about it in the paper. Maybe your dealer is telling you about it, but you've never actually seen one, or at least you've never seen one work, so now you can go to Fremont. People had to park a mile away. There were taxis to get to there. So just that, in itself, is pretty amazing to show you how far the technology had come, but now you can see demonstrations, and there's judges who are rating these machines. So, now you can start to pick and see what the field looks like and how it all works together.
Jodi:
And because of that event, wasn't that how the Nebraska tractor test laboratory came to be?
Neil:
It was part of the equation, and again, a lot of these things go back to Henry Ford. The short version is, Henry Ford's board of directors at the Ford Motor company said, "No, you're not using company resources to build a tractor. It's a waste of money. There's no market. There's no profit." Ford said, "All right, well, I'm going to do it myself," and he forms a company with his son, Edsel, which is where ‘Fordson’ comes from.
Neil:
The other thing that's happening is an entrepreneur in Minneapolis says, "Huh, the country's waiting for a Ford tractor. I need to find someone with the name Ford," which he does, "so I can form the Ford tractor company and sell Ford tractors." So, if someone in Nebraska buys a Ford tractor, he's not really happy with the performance, but trades it in, gets another one, not happy with the performance, trades it in, gets a different model tractor and says, "Well, this one's not only better. It exceeds what they said it was going to do," starts lobbying, joins the state legislature.
Neil:
Eventually, that becomes the Nebraska tests, and what it says is, if you're selling a tractor in the state of Nebraska, it's got to come to Lincoln. It's got to be tested, so that all of your claims are proven true. So, that's another piece of this story, is what are the standards put in place? Are there regulations in place? You've got tractors being built by 150 manufacturers. You got 150 different hitch types. That's a nightmare.
Neil:
And so, I think we often forget that you buy a tractor. Well, you're buying implements, and that's part of the equation. All the implements have to be redesigned, and I think that's where you see some of these larger manufacturers who start to standardize early. Deere's been around 70 years. Harvester's been around 70 years. They've been through this before. They understand the holistic picture, and Henry Ford does to a point where he says, "Yeah, I'm not doing it. Other people are going to build implements for the Fords, because I'm not going to do it."
Jodi:
Why was Deere so late into the tractor manufacturing? Why did they come into the game so late with that?
Neil:
I love the question because it's one of those questions that's really relative, and it's one of the things I set out to outline in the book. The board at Deere voted in 1912 to essentially get into the tractor business. They enter the business in 1918 with the acquisition of the Waterloo gasoline engine company in March. In April, they come out with what's called the all-wheel drive tractor, which has been under development for six years, and I think really through their process, what you see is just how confusing the market was.
Neil:
Deere developed a single cylinder tractor, two cylinder tractor, a four cylinder tractor, tractors that ran on kerosene, gasoline. They couldn't figure out the market. The other piece of the puzzle was, in a period between about 1910 and 1912, Deere went from a company generating sales of $3 million a year to over $30 million a year through acquisitions, expansions, consolidations.
Neil:
So from a resource perspective, they were capped out, and that's where this William Butterworth question comes in, where he very specifically, in September of 1916, writes a letter and says, "I'm opposed to any discussion on Deere manufacturing tractors." How that's interpreted is, he's opposed to the tractor. Well, he said, very specifically, the manufacturing of tractors. That was one of four scenarios that they outlined.
Neil:
Other scenarios are, you buy someone, you contract the engines and transmission, certain components. They have all these different scenarios. He was just saying, "I just met with the bankers. They won't give us money. We don't have enough capital to build a new factory to build tractors, so we're not going that route." That's where these things are interesting, and so this idea of Deere being late, it's relative. Of course, I work for John Deere. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and it's a matter of, we're getting into it when the timing's right.
Neil:
The other piece that they wanted to have in place, which is a gap that they recognize, was selling a tractor is one thing. Having the infrastructure to service it is something else, and that wasn't in place yet. We can sell a tractor, but unless we have dealerships and mechanics in place who can repair it and keep them running and service them until we have implements to sell with our tractor, those are all things they wanted to have in place before they put something on the market.
Jodi:
And then came along the Waterloo Boy tractor from the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company, and they acquired that in 1918. Was that, then, their first tractor?
Neil:
It was. I've had a lot of discussions with people about definitions of the word first.
Jodi:
Yeah, I’ll bet.
Neil:
In my mind, it's the Waterloo Boy because John Deere owned the company, and it was being sold. The first experimental tractor with the John Deere name on the front of it was built 1912, so you could say, "Yeah, that was John Deere's first tractor,: but it was experimental. They built one of them. There's lots of different versions. The all-wheel drive, officially, as far as can tell, came off the line in April. So a month after the Waterloo Boy, there were only 90 to 100 of those all-wheel drives built, but the Waterloo Boy, what Deere liked about it was, it checked all the boxes, existing manufacturing facility, durable. It ran on kerosene. They were worried about the price of gasoline going up after World War I, and so kerosene was less costly than gasoline, and they were right on that. Prices spiked over the next couple years. So again, a lot of these inputs and these costs are part of the equation, and the Waterloo Boy, they were selling 4,000 or 5,000 a year. It had a strong market position, and it was good herbal tracking.
Jodi:
So, you've got the Fords in. You've got Harvesters. You've got Deere now, and of course, you've got a lot of competition and business. What was going on between these three main manufacturers?
Neil:
There's a lot more cooperation than at least I anticipated, so there's a lot of people fighting for market share. You're fighting to raise capital. You're, raising money with shareholders and doing all of these things. Everyone's trying to get a leg up on the competition, but what I like about those three companies is, they all approach it in entirely different ways. If you're reading the book very much from a business management perspective, it's three entirely different strategies that seem to work for each of the three companies, and that's based on just what their companies are about, how they approached it, existing clientele, markets. So, there's lots of factors that go into that. Henry Ford had 75% market share in the mid-1920s. There's 160 or so companies fighting for the 25%, which is incredibly difficult to do.
Neil:
Harvester went from over 50% market share in 1917 to a number two, but a distant number two to Henry Ford a year or later, and so the competitive balance changes really quick, but one of the things that really drew me to the story was, I mentioned that Henry Ford didn't want to build implements, because he said, "There's no money in it. I'm building one tractor on the assembly line. We're building in volume." So, these companies are now working with Henry Ford, and that's what drew me into the story, was Deere was designing a plow for Henry Ford. Harvester was designing harvesting equipment for Henry Ford. Oliver was building plows.
Neil:
There were tractor conversion kits for the Model T. A lot of these things are going on behind the scenes. Deere is collaborating with International Harvester on corn borer tractors in the late 1920s, which is a pest that took over American farms in the mid to late 1920s. So, there's competition. Ford engineers are visiting Deere. Deere engineers are taking a tour of the International Harvester factory to figure out how to outfit their shop. So amazingly enough, there's a ton of cooperation.
Jodi:
World War I and the depression definitely had impacts on these tractor manufacturing companies, and was it World War I, then, that started winnowing down the number of manufacturers with consolidations, and product standards, and so forth?
Neil:
It was the beginning of the end. World War I, what that did was, it caused horse shortages. The United States was shipping horses overseas to the British government to use for the war, and then there were manpower shortages. The other thing that happened during the war is what they called limitation orders, which means there's limitations on raw materials. They were re-examined year over year. But if you were a company that built 20 tractors in 1917, in 1918, you were told, "You're only allocated so much steel, so you can only build 20 tractors this year." So, you weren't able to get a leg up, so it kind of put some larger manufacturers a bit of an advantage, just based on a quota, for lack of a better word.
Neil:
After the war, things really escalate. Things open up again, and it's really in about 1921, in this period where there was price wars driven by depression in the United States, where you start to see smaller manufacturers start to disappear, a lot of consolidation. What happens is, Henry Ford drops the price of a Model T. He drops the price of a Fordson, International Harvester counters. Every other company has to have a response. Deere drops the price of the Waterloo Boy, and your small company's really hard to survive, and so a lot of them disappeared during this period of the early twenties.
Jodi:
The last Fordson came off the assembly line on June 4th of 1928. What happened?
Neil:
Yeah. A lot of things happened, and a lot of it has nothing to do with the Fordson tractor. It has to do with the Model T. Beginning in the early 1920s, Ford's built what he calls the perfect automobile, and we're not changing it. His son, Edsel, others at Ford are trying to convince him to redesign something, build something new. You have the introduction of different transmission and breaking systems. General Motors has the audacity to say, "Hey, we'll paint it different colors." Advertising comes more into play, and Henry Ford starts losing market share. The same is happening with the Fordson. What starts to happen is, companies like Deere, International Harvesters say, "Oh, well, every farm's different," depending on what you're growing, what part of the country you're in, just what your operations are. So, they start to innovate. They start to develop new machines.
Neil:
They start to see machines like the McCormick Deering, 15, 30, and 1020, then the Farmall, and then the Model D and the GP from Deere, Case is coming out with new machines. Ford says, "Nope, Fordson is perfect as it is." So, market share starts to decline a little bit, but the automobile empire is crumbling. By 1926, Ford's got to introduce a new automobile. If they close all their shops, they've got to retool. They've invested tens of millions of dollars into Fordson it’s just kind of victim to that.
Neil:
The other thing Ford's trying to do is build up assembly operations for the Fordson in Cork, Ireland of all places, the ancestral home of the Ford family. There's a lot of pieces is to that puzzle. One of the cliff hangers of the book is, the fortune doesn't disappear forever, but it does disappear domestically with a little inkling of, "Nope, we're coming back," and that does happen later on. I've gotten some grief for that in the book. People say, "Well, the fortune didn't end in 1928." Well, no, kind of. Again, it depends, but I can say the book ends in 1928, domestic production of the Fordson ends in 1928. I don't say it doesn't return.
Jodi:
Okay. Everybody's just going to have to stay tuned and see what happens there. Well, by 1929, there were only 33 American farm tractor manufacturers still left, according to your book. Were they inefficient machines? Companies were just merely experimental? Is that kind of what drew the numbers down?
Neil:
Yeah, it was. It was just really a consolidation of the industry. Manufacturing becomes more capital intensive. You've got companies that made a poor decision. One example is, before Deere started designing their own tractor in 1912, they had been selling tractors for 15 years through its sales branches. They had a strong partnership to sell a big Prairie tractor, called the Big 430, and a company in Rockford, Illinois called Emerson Brandham, actually acquired the big 430.
Neil:
Well, not long after that, they went bankrupt because they put their resources into a large Prairie tractor, which was on its way out. And Deere said, "No, we're not going to do that. We're going to look at smaller tractors. We're looking at the trends." So, you have companies like Emerson Brenham. They were a $50 million dollar year company. They were larger than Deere was, and then a decade later, they're gone. So you see companies like Hart Parr and some of these kind of founders, early creators of the tractor industry, start to merge and consolidate. You start to see companies like Allis Chalmers come together in Minneapolis, Moline. Predecessors of those companies went bankrupt, seemingly a dozen times. They keep getting new life, but it's really, by 1929, it's a new landscape, and there's a lot of factors that go into it, but it's an entirely new playing field.
Jodi:
And that's kind of where your book ends, at the end of the 1920s. Looking back on everything that you've written and you've researched, why do you think the invention of the tractor was so pivotal?
Neil:
Really, I think it literally changed the landscape, but it goes back to Henry Ford saying, "How are we more efficient? How are we productive? It's the same questions we face today. How do you feed more people? There's a growing population. There's fewer people producing. There's fewer people working on the farm. So, how do you do it? Well, the way you do it is, you're more productive. You're more efficient, and the farm tractor, in my mind, really kicked off a new generation of doing that, because if you're horse farming, there's this threshold that you're not going to be more productive farming with horses. You can't increase the horsepower. You can have a bigger team, but you can't increase the speed. You can't have more working at once, and so I think it really changed the landscape moving forward towards just greater productivity.
Jodi:
This is probably something a million people will argue with you about, but who coined the term, “tractor”?
Neil:
Yeah. It dates back to the Hart Parr company in Charles City, Iowa, who my understanding is, they first coined that phrase. Traction engine was used quite a bit. Before then, I think they had a patent application where they used the word, tractor, and then it just evolved over time from there.
Jodi:
Okay. So, how do we keep this era of agriculture alive?
Neil:
I think we keep talking about it. I keep saying that one of the things that's amazing to me is, you know the people who are out there finding, restoring, showing these machines, you go to these farm shows. There's thousands of them every year. It's passing down those stories. It's very much an oral tradition, I think in that respect, and what I was trying to accomplish with the book was to just add another piece to the puzzle.
Neil:
I think everyone's got a different kind of vantage point on it, and I thought my vantage point was, I know records. I can do the research. I can get behind the scenes in some respects and maybe help figure out why things happened, but the magic is in going to these farm shows and talking to people who salvage something. They're restoring it. They know the ins and outs. You can look at advertising and say, "This is how it's supposed to work," but talk to someone who's actually running it, and they can tell you why machines evolve and why operations evolve and implements evolve, and that's really, I think, what's powerful. I encourage people to keep telling those stories.
Jodi:
And you have a lot of stories in that wonderful book. I encourage people to get this book. It's called “Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture”. Neil, can you tell us where people can get the book?
Neil:
You can get the book anywhere that books are sold, local bookstores, online. There's an audio book version, if you're a listener instead of a reader, so there's lots of options.
Jodi:
And one final question. You, as a researcher and after putting this whole book together, how do you feel after doing all of this? All writers know after you've written something, you look back and you go, "Huh, that was really good, or I could have added this to it?"
Neil:
Yeah. It's funny you say that, because I reached the point. I was four and a half years, I think, into the book, and the thing was 350 pages, and I looked at it and I said, "This is not readable." I wouldn't read this book. Then you start working at it, you pull it out, and you start deleting, which is hard to do when you find good stuff and you delete. So, you think a lot about things you left out. You think about what's next.
Neil:
But for me, I'm incredibly proud to bring this. I think the personalities in the book are amazing. I hope people read about new people, new machines, things they didn't know about. That's really exciting, and we'll just see what comes next. I'm looking forward to a lot of conversations that come out of it. I'm actually strangely looking forward to the people who are going to say, "No, you got that wrong," because that's part of the process. I don't know everything, but I think this is very much a community of people who like to have these discussions, and we all have different points of view. So, I'm just really proud of the book, how it came together, and I hope that I've brought out something new that people haven't seen before.
Jodi:
It's excellent. Well, thank you so much. Neil Dahlstrom, I appreciate your time, and hopefully maybe you'll have a sequel someday, bringing us up to, oh, I don't know, maybe the 1950s or something.
Neil:
Yeah. I'd like to do that, because the next thing is the Great Depression, and that changes everything again.