ResoluteReader: Neil Dahlstrom - Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester & the Birth of Modern Agriculture

Wednesday, February 09, 2022

Neil Dahlstrom - Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester & the Birth of Modern Agriculture

The name of John Deere probably means very little to many households, despite its enormous importance as a manufacturer of agricultural equipment and tractors. In October 2021, a major strike by its trade union work force which secured a significant victory defending pay, pensions and conditions. The strike brought John Deere's name to public awareness in a way that the current board of directors would certainly have preferred to avoid. Deere is a major corporation and was, as Neil Dahlstrom's history shows, one of the few early agricultural companies to have successfully made the transition from horse to motorised farming.

The other two companies this book focuses on, Ford and International Harvester, both also had interesting relations with their workforce. When Cyrus McCormick Jr became the president of McCormick Harvesting (later part of International Harvester) in 1884, he drove down wages provoking a major strike by its 1,400 workers. Henry Ford was also notorious for his management style. But Dahlstrom tells a different story here that relates Ford's development of a tractor to the agricultural workforce.

Ford came from a farming background, and having made a fortune in car manufacturing, he wanted to branch out into tractor production. Opposition from shareholders forced him to create a company with his son, Fordson, the eponymous name of the tractor they produced. But its interesting to see what motivated Ford. A New York Times interview reported that Ford "has always wanted to advance the agricultural conditions of the world so that they would keep pace with those of manufacturing and transportation". On a more altruistic level, Dahlstrom reports that Ford hoped his tractor "would finally separate farmers from their land, allowing them to tend to their fields for only a short time each year, freeing them to work in his network of factories the rest of the time".

While the early development of motorised tractors in the United States was frequently described in terms of labour saving work that would improve the efficiency and cost of food production, these two anecdotes show that the real driving interest was profit. In Dahlstrom's history it becomes clear that the Tractor Wars he describes are a classic example of the way that capitalism creates new markets, then concentrates production and profit. In 1917, he tells us, there were 100 different manufacturers of tractors. A decade later there were a handful left, and Ford in particular played a major role in driving many of those out of business.

Key to the adoption of the tractor was the First World War. Dahlstrom shows how the needs of production in the period helped shift farming technology. Ford's first tractors were shipped immediately to Europe to help avert the food crisis caused by the German submarine blockade and labour shortages. The War and government subsidies allowed manufacturers to perfect technology and build plant. It helped make tractors mainstream - though interestingly, particularly in Europe, it did not break dependence on the horse. The Second World War saw to that in England, and the post-war Marshall Plan drove it forward into mainland Europe. Again the US government placed US manufacturing at the centre of the transformation.

Disappointingly though these fascinating stories are all but obscured in Dahlstrom's history. He focuses on the inter-company "war" that shaped manufacturing decisions by the big companies. Frequently the book becomes an obscure list of machines made by different companies and for the non-expert there are too many terms that are left unexplained. What are "spade lugs" for instance? For the non-farmer there is too little explanation of how tractors and machinery transformed agriculture. What, and how, do the various cultivators, harvesters and ploughs actually do? I had hoped to learn a lot more about how farming was changed by the technology, but while we hear the voices of engineers and salesmen, we rarely hear the words of the farmers themselves.

In particular I had hoped that Dahlstrom might give us insights into how US agriculture became a food system utterly dependent on chemical and energy inputs. I'd have liked more on how the use of machinery like tractors helped drive the growth of farming and the creation of the huge, mono-cropped fields we see today. Unfortunately by ending the story in 1930 this is left untold, but I fear the authors over focus on corporate machinations would have obscured this important tale too.

Today agriculture remains big business. Since the Second World War a model of industrial farming has been imposed on much of the rest of the world. But that process began decades earlier in the late 19th and early 20th century. The early years of the 1900s were dominated by the struggle by big corporations to maximise market share and transform farming into a system that could feed their profits. Neil Dahlstrom's book tells part of the story but I suspect most readers will be left wanting more.