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

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“Mr. Dahlstrom…has written a superb history of the tractor and this long-forgotten period of capitalism in U.S. agriculture. We now know the whole story of when farming, business and the free-market economy diverged, divided and conquered.”

—Wall Street Journal

Discover the untold story of the “tractor wars,” the twenty-year period that introduced power farming—the most fundamental change in world agriculture in hundreds of years.

Before John Deere, Ford, and International Harvester became icons of American business, they were competitors in a forgotten battle for the farm. From 1908-1928, against the backdrop of a world war and economic depression, these brands were engaged in a race to introduce the tractor and revolutionize farming.

By the turn of the twentieth century, four million people had left rural America and moved to cities, leaving the nation’s farms shorthanded for the work of plowing, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and threshing. That’s why the introduction of the tractor is an innovation story as essential as man’s landing on the moon or the advent of the internet—after all, with the tractor, a shrinking farm population could still feed a growing world. But getting the tractor from the boardroom to the drafting table, then from factory and the farm, was a technological and competitive battle that until now, has never been fully told.

A researcher, historian, and writer, Neil Dahlstrom has spent decades in the corporate archives at John Deere. In Tractor Wars, Dahlstrom offers an insider’s view of a story that entwines a myriad of brands and characters, stakes and plots: the Reverend Daniel Hartsough, a pastor turned tractor designer; Alexander Legge, the eventual president of International Harvester, a former cowboy who took on Henry Ford; William Butterworth and the oft-at-odds leadership team at John Deere that partnered with the enigmatic Ford but planned for his ultimate failure.

With all the bitterness and drama of the race between Ford, Dodge, and General Motors, Tractor Wars is the untold story of industry stalwarts and disruptors, inventors, and administrators racing to invent modern agriculture—a power farming revolution that would usher in a whole new world.

Our Top Reviews

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Worth every penny buy the product
Review: The service was excellent and the book was in perfect condition I would order from them again anytime. I strongly recommend buying from this vendor whenever possible.

Reviewer: John B
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Absolutely brilliant and hugely enjoyable
Review: 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.

Reviewer: Ernest Lilley
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Ford vs Harvester and John Deere in the rise of the farm tractor
Review: 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.

Reviewer: Enguerrand
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: On time and in shape
Review: Book was delivered on time and as advertized. Thank you. Very interesting book

Reviewer: AV in MD
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Not for a general audience
Review: 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.

Reviewer: Lowell
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Interesting book at a good price.
Review: Loving all things farm equipment, I’ve found this telling of historic brand development very interesting.

Reviewer: Darren Sapp
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Love this History!
Review: 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.

Reviewer: Wiliam M. Sorem
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Intersting Unknown Battle of Tractor Attempts
Review: Fascinating story of the beginning of the US farm tractor. I did not remember that Henry Ford was a farmer, and he forced the development of the Ford tractor over company resistance. There were a lot of other attempts, some of them immediate failures. The book ends before the transition from steel wheels that raised hell with paved roads, to pneumatic tires, pioneered by Allis Chalmers and Ray Firestone. I grew up on a farm and lived through the transition from horses to tractor farming. It was a huge revolution. We went from four horses to an Allis Chalmers C tractor. A Ford tractor feature, well known in my time, was its fast road gear. I remember a neighbor speeding down the highway in front of the farm for his daily trip to the town saloon. He drove very carefully on his return trip. Even though the author is a John Deere historian, I was disappointed that the book ended before the iconic John Deere horizontal two cylinders with flywheel start, and its distinctive put, put sound. I was old enough to hand pull the flywheel with an open petcock on the engine block to start the beast.

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