Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture

Loving all things farm equipment, I've found this telling of historic brand development very interesting.

Written as fluid as an intriguing conversation with an expert in the field, Mr. Dahlstrom’s book is truly remarkable.Fully leveraging the dream-job of John Deere’s Manager of Archives and History (!), the author immerses the reader in the trials and tribulations of the early 20th century genesis of mechanized “traction engines”.The history, background and pluck of the fascinating people that created it all, is as remarkable as the machinery. Corporate board rooms, world wars, trade and transport, finance; it’s all here.I absolutely loved the pace of the text and liberal use of direct quotes (awesome sentence phrasing and unapologetic direct-speak back then!). Very interesting photos throughout.Took my time reading this book to savor it.

I have been interested in tractors for many years and have read a lot regarding the ag equipment industry's history. So there wasn't a lot of new information for but I did learn some new things Mostly about Ford whose history isn't as well-documented as Deere and IH.I've seen other reviewers note that the book seems to end somewhat abruptly in the late 1920s. To me this supports a not-so-obvious theme that runs through this book. While there is a lot of balanced history between all three makers, I took away that the story being told here really is about Deere's advances to successfully compete against IH and Ford in the tractor market. The book ends at the point where Deere got its act together.

Book was delivered on time and as advertized. Thank you. Very interesting book

I expected this to be about how Ford and John Deere fought for supremacy in tractors, but it was a detailed account of those two companies, International Harvester and others, and the specific types of tractors they delivered and when they delivered them, including horsepower, the types of plows they pulled, etc. If you're really interested in that type of minutia, this is the book for you, but it isn't for the general reader. If you're interested in the business competitive factors, personalities, and impact on the growth of agriculture generally, I'm sure there are better books to read. The author is an archivist for John Deere, and he's a very competent writer who has done his research. His audience is not the general public.

I love the history of the Gilded Age and this falls within that scope and right through the early decades of the 1900s. Dahlstrom's gifted writing presents this agricultural and manufacturing history in a way that keeps the reader engaged. I love our farmers including my own family that used one of those early tractors during the Great Depression for heavy work while a team of horses served as a secondary power for farm work. The attached photo show my grandfather (second from right) working on a threshing crew in the early 1920s where he first embraced machine vs. horse.

looks like a lot of information and should be a very good read. Would liked to see more photos of the era between them but should be interesting.

There’s something about tractors that draws a boy’s attention. I learned to drive in the 1960s on a 1948 Farmall Cub on my grandfather’s land in Vermont, and at a recent visit to a farm stand, I was delighted to find an almost identical, so it’s not surprising that Tractor Wars caught my eye. (Note: the photo here is me on a Farmall Cub, the tractor I learned to drive on some 50 years ago.)In Tractor Wars, Neil Dahlstrom gives us an inside look at the birth of the farm tractor starting in the late 1800s and culminating with Ford’s transition to overseas manufacturing in Ireland at the end of the 1920s. Drawing heavily on biographies, board room records, and newspaper clippings, the book’s focus is on corporate strategies, alliances, and competitions. Readers may be surprised to discover how late to the game John Deere was, but not especially surprised that when Henry Ford entered the fray with his Fordson tractor, his techniques of mass production and ruthless pricing gave him immediate dominance in the field(s).While the focus is on the competition, largely between Harvester (which became International Harvester), Deere, and Ford, what I found most interesting was how the story of the tractor meshed with other events. The rise of an industrialized economy and the outbreak of war in Europe meant the beginning of the exodus from the farm, and the tractor was a large part of the mechanization of agriculture that allowed for much larger yields and reduced labor. Henry Ford, who looms large in this tale, grew up on a farm but had no love for farming and was frustrated by the inefficiencies he saw in farm practice. Not only did he want to make farming a modern business, but he wanted to free the agricultural workforce to work in factories.At the turn of the century, horse and mule were the rule in farming, but over the next two decades, the adoption of power machinery lead to bigger farms and paved the way to modern agribusiness. Ford, always the champion of the average buyer produced a smaller tractor than Harvestor, or eventually, Deere. Aimed at the small farm and priced to be affordable to anyone his Fordson tractor would dominate sales for over a decade.Neil Dahlstrom puts human faces on the drama in a very readable way. I would have liked more about the technical evolution of the machines, but if it’s not the main thrust it’s not neglected. The text is about the companies and the men that ran them, but the story is set against the rise of the industrial age, which it shows from a unique perspective.