Ep #15: How the “Tractor Wars” Transformed American Agriculture with Neil Dahlstrom
What can the rise of steam-powered tractors teach us about today’s tech booms? In this episode of The Land Ledger, Brian Kearney sits down with Neil Dahlstrom, historian and author of Tractor Wars, for a deep dive into the early evolution of farm technology and the major players that shaped it. Neil shares insights from his extensive archival research, shedding light on the surprising boom of steam engine tractors and their use in large-scale farming operations, as well as the roles of major companies like John Deere, International Harvester, and Ford Motor Company in shaping the competitive landscape of the tractor market.
Listen in to learn about the parallels between early 20th-century tractor innovation and today’s tech bubbles, the early adoption of gasoline engines on farms, and how innovations like the bull tractor unlocked the market for smaller, more practical machines. Neil also talks about his current role at John Deere, where he helps the company connect past lessons to modern innovations, including autonomy and precision ag.
Listen to the Full Episode:
What You’ll Hear About in This Episode:
The three-way rivalry between Ford, International Harvester, and John Deere in the 1910s and 1920s.
The competitive landscape of the tractor market.
Challenges farmers faced in trusting and adopting new machinery.
The history and evolution of farm tractors.
How Deere learned from past tractor failures.
How historical research and archives help modern companies.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“ As records evolve, I often say that I'm kind of a historical translator. So if you know about the company today and ask me a question, I've gotta translate that into what that meant in 1940 or 1972, whether [it’s] a machine name, a factory name, the name of a division, or a product line. And so that allows us to get into the records.” - Neil Dahlstrom
“ I love context, and I wanted to write something that was different than anything that was out there. I wanted to really dig down deep and figure out the decisions people were making. What were the contextual drivers? Who are the personalities?” - Neil Dahlstrom
“ Don't go with preconceived notions of what something is or why people made decisions. [Giving] yourself the time and the opportunity to do that is really important. And what you'll see is kind of these signposts along the way.” - Neil Dahlstrom
Resources:
Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture by Neil Dahlstrom
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Read the Transcript:
Neil Dahlstrom: It sounds a lot like the dot-com bubble of the nineties. I think a lot of people have a hard time thinking about it, but a tractor in the 1920s, that was the technology, that was a big deal, and it was a technology investment in 1920, so you wanted to get in early and reap your rewards.
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Brian Kearney: All right. Welcome to the Land Ledger. Today I've got Neil Dahlstrom, a historian for Deere, and the author of a phenomenal book called “Tractor Wars,” which we'll get into a little bit later. Neil, welcome to the show.
Neil Dahlstrom: Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, thanks for coming. This is going to be a really fun one for me. I actually got my degree in history as well. Though I went to slightly different path. I always love talking to history nerds, so this is gonna be great.
Neil Dahlstrom: I talked to a lot of people who studied history, and it was one of my dilemmas is what do you do with that?
Brian Kearney: Right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You're actually doing it, which, I think, everyone else who studied history is probably a little bit jealous, but tell me a little bit about that. How did you get into history itself, and why did you choose to study that in school?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, I think it just really came from going to a lot of museums when I was a kid. We weren't a family that went on vacations. But I grew up in the Quad Cities, which is two and a half hours from Chicago. So a lot of childhood memories of going up to the museums up there and hitting the local museum. So I think that's where it came from is just being sucked in by probably the stories of the past.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. I think that's such a common reason. When you talk to people that studied history. I found it's one of two things. Either that exact thing, or they had one teacher that really brought history alive for 'em. It's always one of those two.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yep. I have that too.
Brian Kearney: Really? Okay. Tell me about that.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. I had a teacher in high school who gave me the book, “The Killer Angels,” Michael Shaara, which is a fictional account of the Battle of Gettysburg. And I remember reading it over the weekend.
Brian Kearney: Oh wow.
Neil Dahlstrom: And just like listening, you know, as fictional dialogue, but just being there, first person, just kind of blew me away. So I think that kind of cemented a lot of things for me that really just kind of personalized people in history, right?
Brian Kearney: Right. Yeah, absolutely. For me, it was also museums and books. My family was similar. Vacations would be a drive away, and it always had something educational. My family was really big on that.
We weren't a theme park family. We were a museums or things like Cahokia Mounds, things like that were what we did. So I get that, and then books is the same way. I wanted to always read fiction, and I was big into fantasy, and like westerns were kind of my two specialties, but my mom made me switch off in between everyone. So you could read that that's fine, but you're reading a biography, like, okay. And it stuck, I love it now.
Neil Dahlstrom: I kind of went through the medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, and then Civil War. Really big. I did some Civil War reenacting in high school, and just what you learn in a very short period of time is really incredible. So yeah, it's always funny kind of the arc people have in the subject matters.
Brian Kearney: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Then what did you study in college in history? Did you specialize in ag, or where were you studying?
Neil Dahlstrom: No. So I actually volunteered at a couple local museums in high school, so that's where I knew that I was able to handle primary sources, and we had a civil war, a Confederate prison camp here locally, and researching those records, I really fell in love with that.
So I was a history and classics major with an art minor in college and got really into classical history, Greece, and Rome. And I actually studied ancient Greek for two years. I was so into it, but one of my professors created a job for me in the college archives.
This was at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois, and so just kind of roads kept leading to documents for me.
And back then, so this was in the mid to late nineties, if you studied history, you either taught or went to law school. And I had to do 20 hours as a freshman and in a sixth-grade classroom, and the kids ate me alive. So teaching was out, and I took my introverted personality, and that kind of led me to museums and archives. I went on to grad school and got a degree in historical administration with a concentration in archives.
Brian Kearney: Okay. Wow. That is really the two paths. People either teach or go to law school. I was actually planning on going to law school when I went to college and then realized I'd kind of disliked everything about that. I don't know. School was never a huge fan of mine. I always did well, but I just like learning on my own. I think I had that little bit of rebellious streak, which doesn't mesh with being a professor either. So yeah, this is the path I went.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. I've always said like one of the greatest things that have happened to me was I figured some things out early of at least the direction, and I was able to look at and go, “Okay. Well, I'm willing to accept a low salary and a low standard of living in order to follow my passion.” So yeah, that's the agriculture part. It was part of my background. My dad … built combines on the line.
Brian Kearney: How does that dynamic go now that you're a Deere?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, not bad. He was retiring right when I was starting at Deere. So really, I didn't have an ag background necessarily, and I was hired as an archivist at John Deere to work in the archives. So it wasn't because of my rich, I think I've probably heard of John Deere, and as a person, but didn't know anything about it.
I think in third grade I learned John Deere build a steel plow, and that was the extent of what I knew about the company.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Wow. So what does an archivist for a company do day to day? Or what is the reason for having archivists for a large company?
Neil Dahlstrom: So it's acquiring records. So a big part of my job is determining what records we acquire and what we're gonna keep long term.
So if it comes into the archives, it's there forever, which I always say is a very long time. So you just don't capture everything and keep everything. But we try to keep a historical
record of products, of people, of places. It's kind of the who, what, when, why, and how of the company. And so you do that through records, and a big part of my job is what types of records contain that information.
So as records evolve, I often say that I'm kind of a historical translator, so if you know about the company today and ask me a question, I've gotta translate that into what that meant in 1940 or 1972, whether a machine name, a factory name, the name of a division, or a product line. And so that allows us to get into the records.
So kind of the historian part comes over time, but at essence, my job is to collect, kind of preserve, and then access those records. And then you just, you read a lot. I had a really bad habit, which is a great habit, which is you go pull an archival box that's got 50 folders of records in it, you're looking for one thing.
So I would sit down and read everything in the box because archives are not a Google search where you just, you type in a term and you get everything. So it's definitely subjective, and it's an art form to do the research.
Brian Kearney: Oh yeah, that's, oh, I can't remember the name of the book right now. I'll look it up and put it in the show notes. But he collects books and like encyclopedias and things like that for that exact reason that people think that by searching Google, you're getting all of the information, but you're actually getting a fraction of the information about that topic. So that's interesting. What made you have the idea to start writing a book? Because that's gotta be just a slog to get that through. So what gave you that idea?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, it is actually my third book, but I hadn't, my last, actually my first two books came out in 2005, so it had been quite a while. And it was part of the challenge is I knew what went into it, and it gets scarier and harder to make that commitment.
But really it started, we were celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the John Deere tractor in 201,8 and so I started my research probably in 2016, and the approach is, okay, what are the milestones? What are the talking points? What are the assets? We need photos and we need films, and we're gonna develop exhibits.
And we hosted a big show in Waterloo, Iowa. A big blowout kind of weekend. And so as you do that, your course just kind of making discoveries in the records. So I would find something and put it aside and then I'd put something aside, and all of a sudden you gotta file cabinet full of stuff you put aside and you stare at and go, “Well, there's a lot more to this than I was thinking of.” I'm very much, I love context and I wanted to write something that was different than anything that was out there, meaning this wasn't a
coffee table book. I wanted to really dig down deep and figure out decisions people were making.
What were the contextual drivers? Be it World War I or the Spanish flu, which actually had an incredible impact on the early tractor industry. And just who are the personalities 'cause at the end of the day, you can talk about the equipment and the machines, but this is about people making decisions and they're not all great decisions. Those are the ones I'm really interested in.
Brian Kearney: Right. What's one that you could highlight?
Neil Dahlstrom: The book kind of primarily follows three different companies, International Harvester, Deere, and Ford. And I think from the perspective of Henry Ford who said he was gonna build a million tractors a year and built the infrastructure to do it.
Even with 75% market share in the mid twenties, the best he ever did was like 110,000 tractors. And so actually, one of the early documents that I found was I didn't know that there was much of a relationship between Deere and Ford at this time, and we have a document in the John Deere archives, which was a report given to the board of directors in the early 1920s.
So some folks from Deere went up to visit Henry Ford, and he was trying to convince Deere to build a million plows a year for Fords and tractors. And Theo Brown, one of the engineers, he said, “Well, we think Ford's wrong and he's gonna fail at this 'cause he doesn't understand farmers very well and he doesn't understand this industry,” which is a bold thing to say about the richest person in the world and the most successful tractor and automobile manufacturer in the world. So he recommended that deer build a hundred plows to start instead of a million. And so you just kind of look at that a hundred years later and go, “Incredibly bold.” Also, possibly a company-destroying decision, potentially. But then you fast forward and they were essentially right.
Brian Kearney: Right, right. And that probably gets to the heart of why you don't see forward as the main power in ag now is because of that type of decision, would be my guess. Is that kind of what you've found through your research?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, absolutely. And it's really what fascinated me about these companies in particular is kind of their cultures were different. Their approach to farm equipment was different. And so I was just really struck that you could have three companies trying to do the same thing, and their approaches were not even close to being similar in any way. And so this very much developed into a behind-the-scenes business history.
And it's just decision after decision after decisions, and then you start to understand how hard it is to be right more often than not.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah. And I want to dive into those three different paths into building out the tractor industry in a second. But first, I want to highlight something you're talking about there with Ford.
I think that's what we still see in this industry from anyone coming outside of the industry in, so you see this in ag tech all the time, where you'll hear about a company raising tens or sometimes a hundred plus million dollars and then you check back in five years, like, “Wait a second. They're a fraction of what they were.” And why is that? It's because. It's a slow-moving industry for a reason. If farmers get one time to plant and one time to harvest every year, they're not just gonna take whatever new technology you bring in, particularly if that new technology doesn't actually have any benefit. It might be cool, but it might not drive anything to the bottom line.
So that's what I really pulled out of that specific section and a couple different sections in the book where that was a lot of the thought process behind farmers at that time. It was like, it wasn't just this war between the three, it was also those three versus the status quo, which was horses like, I mean, right now horses are working, we're profitable.
“Will I be profitable?” This was their question, and I think we forget that still in the industry with a lot of things coming out.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. And we forget it, tractors didn't outnumber horses on American farms till the mid-1950s.
Brian Kearney: Oh, wow.
Neil Dahlstrom: So it, it took a very long time. Of course, things get in the way, the Great Depression and World War II, but those things actually accelerated tractor adoption. World War I accelerated the industry.
It took a world war for people to look and go, “Oh, there's a horse shortage and there's a labor shortage.” So now there's actually some merit to me maybe adopting this farm tractor out of necessity and at the end of the day, the farmer's kind of value proposition hasn't changed in hundreds of years, which is it's gotta be profitable for me and my operation and that was a big part of this early–one contemporary editor called it The Gorgeous Nightmare Period, which is, it's just kind of a free for all.
You can buy anything you want. There's hundreds of manufacturers and entrepreneurs selling you what you want. But then, yeah, did it work? Oh, well, I don't know. The manufacturer left and took my money. So there's plenty of that.
Brian Kearney: Right. Yeah, no, that's for sure. And a few minutes ago you said something about the Spanish flu as well. Dive into how that changed the adoption of tractors as well.
Neil Dahlstrom: So that was really right after World War I, and it just contributed to the labor shortage. I mean, there were millions of deaths worldwide, and you have kind of this confluence of returning war veterans did not return to the rural homes and to the farm. They were moving to cities, and then you had the rural population especially hit by the Spanish flu.
You had people in quarantine and so all of that kind of contributes to, “Well, I need reliable power on the farm.” There was actually an equine flu that went through the United States, hit Kansas incredibly hard. So that added to the horse shortage. You just kinda look at all of these events and they're all contributing factors.
Brian Kearney: Right, and correct me if I'm wrong, but for the Spanish flu as well, wasn't it a disproportionate number of young fit people as well, which is your labor for farms?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, absolutely. And I like to think of like these marketing managers saying, “Well, this is how we're gonna roll this out and this is our strategy.” And then having to deal with all these external forces of, “Okay, well, I guess that's the driver now.”
Brian Kearney: Right. Yeah. There could probably be some pretty interesting creative written during that time. Okay. And then let's go back to the three different players. What were the three different paths that each company chose?
Neil Dahlstrom: So the scope of the book, the main focus is 1908 to 1928. It's 1908, it's kind of this, the early evolution. So you have this transition from these big prairie tractors that are 50, 60, 70-plus horsepower. There aren't a lot of 'em sold. There's a couple companies making 'em, International Harvesters by far the market leader.
They're also building automobiles. They're vertically integrated. They're the largest binder manufacturer in the world, and they're formed in 1902. So you have Harvester, which is a hundred million dollars a year in sales business, and then you have John Deere, which is a $3 million a year business, who in the 19, early 19s, about 1910 to 1912, where the tractor industry is maybe 4,000 units a year. It's not even really on Deere's radar. They've made some acquisitions. They go in the harvesting business to compete with International Harvester 1912. They think that's the end of their consolidation and acquisitions.
And then Henry Ford, who in 1908 tells the world he's gonna build a farm tractor. And the world said, “I've never heard of this guy. I don't know who he is, so I don't really care.” And then a month later, he introduces the Model T and all of a sudden everyone's waiting on a Ford tractor. So really the paths are Ford has capital resources, lends the assembly line eventually, and he's just gonna kill everyone on volume and price. That's essentially the strategy. “One size fits all. I'm gonna sell it cheap and I'm gonna build a lot of them and I'm gonna leverage my automobile dealerships and sales channels.”
International Harvester has both McCormick and Deere dealerships across the country by far the most extensive dealer network. They got a wide variety of tractors, different sizes, horsepower ranges, so they're kind of the most diversified and just can create volume as well. Not on the scale of Ford, but they basically have a state-of-the-art tractor factory they build in Chicago.
And then you have John Deere, which it's hard to imagine it today, but John Deere is kind of like the little engine that could during this period, which is the board votes in 1912 that we're gonna develop what they called a tractor plow, which would've been a tractor with an integral undermounted plow, which is based on an existing tractor called the Hackney Motor Plow.
And they spend the next six or seven years trying to figure out what the market is. And that was really the transition of Deere was trying to figure it out. They had to be very careful because they could not raise the capital to actually build a tractor. But what they did was they established their criteria they wanted in a farm tractor, and it really took the next six or seven years for the market to really start to develop and for them to kind of pick their spot, which ultimately led to the acquisition of the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company in 1918.
And it was actually one of the questions that I'd been asked a lot over the years, which is why Deere was so late getting into the tractor business. And I would always say, “Well, it didn't feel very late to me in comparison to the market.” So they were fairly early and the Waterloo acquisition seemed to be really quick and sudden.
Well, the reality is they'd been at it for seven years. So when the opportunity came and the Waterloo Boy was available to them, that's what they've been trying to design and build for the last seven years.
Brian Kearney: Huh. That makes sense. And why continue to design and build when you can just use your expertise to accelerate what's already there? That's interesting.
Neil Dahlstrom: Right, right.
Brian Kearney: And then if we go back, so Ford wasn't in Ag at all during the time of the steam Prairie tractors. John Deere was a little bit, was there ever an interest in the large steam tractors at that time?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, there was, and actually John Deere himself partnered with the maker of a steam engine in the 1860s, believe it or not, at the Illinois State Fair. And it pulled a 12-bottom John Deere plow. And Deere was so excited, he came back and told the newspaper, “I'm gonna build one of these steam engines if it's the last thing I do.” And then no one ever heard from him on the subject again.
Brian Kearney: I wonder, why do we know?
Neil Dahlstrom: I just think it was really hard to do.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, yeah.
Neil Dahlstrom: The capital intents and difficult to do, and so he kind of disappeared. But really in the 1880s and nineties, Deere was selling some of these steam engines and early prairie tractors so they had these relationships. So they had some idea of what the industry was about. Through those partnerships and had actually attempted to acquire a couple companies in the nineteens, and it's another one of those what ifs. they had a partnership with the gas traction company, which was Deere had decided, the board voted to make an offer to buy this company, and it was one of these big prairie tractors.
And by the time they got around to it, they found that another company called Emerson Brandham bought the company. And 10 years later they were all bankrupt. Yeah. So it may have been one of those things where the dear executives are sitting around going, “Well, we dodged a boat there.”
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Kinda lucky on that one. That's funny. And then for the audience that might not know, and I imagine a lot of our audience will, but it's worth diving into. What is the difference between the steam engines from that period and these internal combustion, either kerosene or gasoline engines a little bit later?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, it's just really the power. I mean, these steam engines were heavy. You were towing 'em from location to location, essentially, with a massive team of horses, and basically they worked by building up pressure in the steam chamber. And so that's what's driving the belts and everything. They were a fire hazard, especially out on the prairie, so they were incredibly dangerous. They could explode at any given time. It was hard moving them across wooden bridges. So you look back and you find these photos of these steam engines that have collapsed a bridge and you kinda lose the entire outfit and then you move to the internal combustion engine.
And I think something that's overlooked, what was really keeping manufacturers from experimenting with the internal combustion engine is because they were patent protected up until about 1890, and then some early patents went into the public domain and now everyone can kind of build on that technology.
Brian Kearney: Interesting. That makes a lot of sense why it exploded then. If we go back to the steam engine, 'cause it's still fascinating and they're cool to see. I've seen a couple at like Thresher Men reunion type stuff, you'll see 'em every once in a while. What was the use case like why would they have been using them if there were all these downsides? What were they used for?
Neil Dahlstrom: Well, I mean, it was typically, you would hook up maybe like a Baylor or something else to it. But they were used on these big, massive, essentially commercial farms. So it was really just scale. So you'd go out and you'd use your binder and you would kind of cut down, you'd harvest the wheat, and then you'd bring it in here and say, instead of having someone actually hand thrashing your grain, then you could use a machine to do that. So for these big, massive operations, it was really productive in that way.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And then I'm sure that a lot had to be cut out to get to this book. If you had probably thousands of hours of archival research, what are a couple stories that didn't make it into the book, but you think might be pretty interesting to the audience?
Neil Dahlstrom: One of the challenges is by the mid-1920s there's over 160 companies that are building tractors, and those are only the ones that the government is actually recording. So there's many more. I do talk some about a pastor named Daniel Hartsaw, who built several tractors, large prairie tractors, he'd sell 'em.
He went on to develop the bull tractor, which was the first kind of commercially viable small tractor, which really transformed the industry. There's just a lot. He went into partnership with his son and then they had a falling out. He sold his automobile to raise money to build a tractor at one point.
And so he's in the book because he is really just this really interesting entrepreneur who just believes in the industry. So even though there's some in the book, there's a lot on the cutting room floor. Mostly the fights between he and his son.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah, I bet. I bet.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. And that's the challenge. I had one day where I cut a hundred pages out of the book.
Brian Kearney: Whoa.
Neil Dahlstrom: And it was just a lot of these stories and what happens with when you're trying to kind of create this narrative is a lot of things get in the way and you get distracted. So that's the hard part. I think the story of Paul Ford, which is mentioned a little bit in the book is really interesting.
Henry Ford was having a hard time bringing a tractor to market. So he initially announced it in 1908. It took him a decade to actually sell a tractor in the United States. So in the meantime, a small company was formed and they said, “Well, we wanna call it the Ford Tractor Company, so we need to find someone whose last name is Ford.” So they hired this guy named Paul Ford, and they build this Ford tractor and they start selling the Ford Tractor. Nobody knows the difference.
Brian Kearney: Wow.
Neil Dahlstrom: And it's essentially a failure. They sell some, they break down, they replace some, they build a new version, they break down and then they all skip town.
So basically, they were all frauds. And how much knowledge Paul Ford had of all of that, whether he was in on it, whether he was a bit of a patsy, it's always hard to say, and I'd like to spend the next five years just learning more about that. But the records, sometimes the trail just kind of runs dry.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense
Neil Dahlstrom: On the information.
Brian Kearney: That makes sense, especially if, you don't want there to be a whole lot of trail, if you were defrauding a lot of people.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. If you look through newspapers of this era, there's this announcement after announcement across the country of these new organizations raising money and raising capital and they're issuing stock and then they take your money and disappear. It was happening a lot.
Brian Kearney: Sounds AI bubble right now? A little bit, doesn't it?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. It sounds a lot like the.com bubble of the nineties. I think a lot of people have a hard time thinking about it, but a tractor in the 1920s, that was the technology, that was a big deal, and it was a technology investment in 1920, so you wanted to get in early and reap your rewards.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense. It is kind of crazy to think about 'cause when people think about the ag industry on the outside, and I don't think it's quite fair, but they don't see it as technologically advanced as it is. Where in the book you spoke a little bit about the early gasoline engine, and that was just fascinating to me that farmers will adopt new technologies immediately if they can see that it will improve their bottom line. And that, again, is something that sometimes they think people on the outside don't envision. But you talk about autonomous cars and it's only been the past few years, it's ben in the ag industry of tractors for quite a bit longer than cars.
So it's just something that people don't think about. But talk a little bit about what that research you did with early gasoline engines and how farmers were using that at that time before tractors came into the picture.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, I mean, I guess there's lots of different ways to think about it and yes, it's really easy to fall in love with the technology, but not actually have a use for it. So that's a lot of the story, and so you have these big tractors, and then you have these small stationary, one and a half three horsepower stationary engines that you're using to run. Maybe you're helping it run a small threshing machine, or you're using it eventually to run a washer, or an ice cream machine or an irrigation pump. So that's kind of the early adoption of the technology and this whole concept of, well, let's put that on wheels and make it mobile. It feels like it took a really long time to make that happen.
Brian Kearney: Right. It kind of does. 'cause it was like the late 1890s that people were using gasoline engines a little bit on farms, right?
Neil Dahlstrom: Right. And there's such a kind of parallel to the adoption of indoor plumbing. And so just electricity, the introduction of electricity. There, it's a lot of technological change at the same time and none of it's free. So you gotta pick your spots. And I've always, looking back, it's easy to judge things a hundred plus years later, but it's surprising to me that it took so long for someone to figure out that most farms in the country were small.
And there were, I think, 6 million farms in the United States in the 1920s, and most of them were under 50 acres, so if you're building these enormous tractors, there's just not a market for 'em. There's no scale. And it was really that bull tractor in 1913, which was seven horsepower and would pull a single bottom plow, maybe two if you were, we know because it tipped over quite a bit and didn't work well under load that people were putting a tour trying to put a three-bottom plow behind it. But that was really what I unlocked the industry and help companies like Deere go, “Oh, a small tractor for an average-sized farm is the market 'cause now there's volume.”
Brian Kearney: Huh. Fascinating. I wonder, if there's a, bull tractor book coming out down the road, that'd be interesting,
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. Well, and one of the,you always just find these interesting origin stories. So this pastor Daniel Hartsaw that I mentioned, the bull was his idea, and he helped Ford, they needed engines.
And during this period, most of these companies did not have their own manufacturing facilities, so they were going to machine shops and they were contracting. So some of these machine shops were building tractors for 6, 8, 10 different brands, but Hartsaw needed engines. So they formed a separate company that they named Toro to build engines for the bull.
And so that was kind of the origins of the Toro company today.
Brian Kearney: Fascinating. I never would've thought. That's almost like the Henry Ford-Dodge connection that you talk about a little bit in the book as well, which is always interesting.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah. If, I mean, if someone's looking for a research topic, brand names during this period are incredible. Yeah. Just because you'd have, you had the brands who went with what they just thought was a commercially popular name. So you had like the Tom Thumb tractor or Old National, or the Happy Farmer. So you had these gray, Uncle Sam was one of 'em. And then you had companies which was more common, which was just your company name and then a horsepower rating.
It was a McCormick Deere 1020 or the 1530. And so again, just different kind of tactics and approaches to that.
Brian Kearney: Right, right. And let's switch tacks a little bit. How does the work you do now for Deere influence how people view Deere and also how Deere views itself and can learn from its past? 'cause I imagine that's a huge part of it is where did we do things correctly? Where do we do things incorrectly? How do we make more of the correct decisions down the road? So what? What does that look like when you're working for a company like John Deere?
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, it's a great question and I'll say that it, I'm pretty privileged to work for a company like this that actually values its history, and that's more than, “Okay, we have all these boxes of records.”
It's, “What are the insights we can glean from this?” As we think about autonomy or software as a service, the sea and spray technology on John Deere sprayers, we tend to ask questions and say, “Well, have we been down this road before?” Because we know it's a long continuum. You don't start with autonomy, right? So what's kind of the step innovation and we like to have evidence of it.
We like to be able to show that that was a real thing and it's worth the effort. An archives colleague of mine at another company said that his CEO often talks about how we don't have time to learn things that we already know. So know what we already know.
Brian Kearney: Oh boy. Yeah. That's crazy. That's a good thought.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, and so we tend to look at things. We went through an exercise a number of years ago where we looked at our full history dating back to 1837, and it actually started with Bob Lane, who was our CEO from about 2000 to 2010.
And he said, “What are the five most important moments in company history?” Which is a pretty daunting ask. Like, I need five bullets for a slide. These are the five most important things. And we know the first one is John Deere's first steel plow. So I only got four to work with over the next 170 years, right? And so anytime it needs to be succinct, that just requires more effort. Well, we kind of took that and then 10 years later I was looking at it and said, “Well, because of context, because of lots of things.” Nothing is a moment, right? Nothing just shows up out of the blue. So what are all the events that lead up to it?
And so we developed this kind of idea of these eras. And so the idea was let's not have any preconceived notions of these. Neil's just gonna read everything in Saye. We're gonna have discussions about it. We're gonna kind of present evidence. We found these eras of transformation and kind of the big themes without going into a whole thing about it is there aren't a lot of 'em.
There's these eras and they take oftentimes eight to 10 years or so in order to develop a strategy, then start to execute it, and then you kind of build on that for decades. Well, what we saw when you start to kind of piece that together is the periods in between keep getting shorter and shorter and shorter.
Brian Kearney: Fascinating. Okay.
And so we would have, one of the eras would be 1907 and 1918, where the company, we wholly consolidate subsidiaries and joint ventures and partnerships. We make 10 acquisitions. We go into the harvesting business, we buy Waterloo. That's kind of the end of 1918. So then from 1918 to the 1950s, you kind of just see an evolution of, okay, harvesting equipment gets bigger, and it goes from a pull-behind combine to a self-propelled combine to a two-row corn head to a four-row corn head.
Tractors are getting, we stick with a two-cylinder engine and they're getting bigger and bigger and more powerful, right? And then you hit this next era, which takes basically eight years depending on how fuzzy you wanna make your math of when things start and when things end. But they get closer together.
So that was a big kind of aha that even a company that's as old as ours, there's these very specific periods where you're deciding you're all in on something and either it's really successful or it's not.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. And do you think the periods in between each of those eras are shrinking because of just speed? Is it, what is it? Is it just technological speed or what is doing that?
Neil Dahlstrom: I think it's speed. I think it's the adoption curve's getting shorter. And I think there's a lot more external influence. It's not an ag pure play that's coming in to disrupt your business. It comes from anywhere now, and I think that's a lot more prevalent than it's ever been before.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's interesting. That makes a lot of sense. If you were to hazard a guess and you were looking back 30 years at the time we're in, would you say this is one of those eras or is this the in-between times?
Neil Dahlstrom: I think this is one of those eras, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. So much so that I usually just cop out of the question and go, “Well, ask me in 20 years.”
I think from a Deere perspective, you can go back and think about what we used to call precision farming, that technically started at Deere in 1993 with the creation of the precision farming group we called it. And so that was kind of the introduction of our early GPS receivers, which became StarFire.
And you can kind of chart this course towards autonomy and some of these current technologies. I got a video from 1970 where John Deere built a remote-controlled 40/20 tractor, which is the craziest thing because it's these two farmers sitting on a bench with this enormous like stainless steel remote control with like an eight-foot antenna on it.
Brian Kearney: That's hilarious. Wow.
Neil Dahlstrom: Driving, yeah, driving this tractor. So you can take these things always, kind of have precursors, right? But it was the nineties when Deere said, “No, this is, we think this is the future of agriculture.”
But really I think you get into probably, from a company standpoint, like even looking at things like the acquisition of Birkin and some of these joint ventures. I think you start to see this kind of era start to form probably seven or eight years ago.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Neil Dahlstrom: So yeah, I would argue that we are in one right now, and actually, where the research started is we thought we were, something felt different. And so some people just started asking the question.
They're like, “What's the precedent for this? What is this era we're in now?” So we typically use today to start the historical research and sometimes the stars don't align, and we say, “No, there's not really any parallels here.” And sometimes there are, and you do find that sometimes from a technology standpoint, we introduce something, and just the market wasn't right or the technology wasn't there.
And you find that across all industries and we're no exception to that.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we're getting pretty close on time. I want to be aware of your time. This has been a really, really fun conversation for me. I appreciate you taking the time. What would you recommend for our audience and how would you recommend they study their own history to ensure that they don't make a mistake with the family's legacy, if that makes sense. If you know kind of what I'm getting to, and our farmers are John Deere's clients, they're corn and bean farmers in the Midwest, usually pretty good size. How do you recommend they study that to make sure they don't make mistakes that maybe their families already learned from?
Neil Dahlstrom: I think you, you have to do the research, you have to do the reading. Don't go with preconceived notions of what something is or why people made decisions, and give yourself kind of the time and the opportunity to do that I think is really important. And what you'll see is kind of these signposts along the way.
And it's not always just because someone made a statement or quote, we're fascinated with like, well, here's a quote from a CEO. Well, figure out why that was said and what the context is, and I think you'll start to see these decisions that were made over time. This is how we do our business.
This is kind of what our culture is and who we are, and that changes and evolves depending on the situation. But I guess the other thing I would add is look at crises because that's what tests kind of your values. It's really easy to succeed when everything's good and everyone's succeeding, but when you have to make really hard decisions and you have to figure out a way to survive, and you have to figure out what's next, it's never one size fits all. It's complicated and just recognize it and understand it and own it, I think is really important. And at the end of the day, how do you serve your customers? And that's what we find time and time again. We've got a great quote from John Deere because he got into a fight with his partner in 1852 and his partner said, “Customers are gonna buy whatever we make.”
John Deere said, “We have to continuously improve our product, or somebody else will beat us and we will lose our trade.” So John Deere was the product improvement, continuous improvement guy, and he couldn't keep a partner as a result of it.
Brian Kearney: Interesting.
Neil Dahlstrom: So yeah, I think just explore and your story's unique and let it be, don't try to make it somebody else's story, and I think that's really important.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Well, thanks for the time today. This has been a great conversation. I'll leave a link to the book in the show notes. Thanks for jumping on the show.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah. If you don't mind mentioning the book will be out in paperback next month on May 13th.
Brian Kearney: Perfect.
Neil Dahlstrom: But yeah, I really appreciate your interest in taking the time. And I appreciate that. The questions are a lot different than a lot of questions I get. I mean, it was more deep dive, so I appreciate that.
Brian Kearney: Good. Well, hey, thank you. I try, I put some time into these, so I appreciate that. That's good to hear.
Neil Dahlstrom: Yeah, I could tell.
Brian Kearney: Perfect.
And that’s a wrap on this episode of The Land Ledger.
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