Tractor Wars

<b>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. <b>&#151;<i>Wall Street Journal</i><br></b><br><b>Discover the untold story of the &#147;tractor wars&#148; the twenty-year period that introduced power farming&#151;the most fundamental change in world agriculture in hundreds of years.</b></b><br><br>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.&#160;<br><br> By the turn of the twentieth century four million people had left rural America and moved to cities leaving the nation&#146;s farms shorthanded for the work of plowing planting cultivating harvesting and threshing. That&#146;s why the introduction of the tractor is an innovation story as essential as man&#146;s landing on the moon or the advent of the internet&#151;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.<br> <br>A researcher historian and writer Neil Dahlstrom has spent decades in the corporate archives at John Deere. In <i>Tractor Wars</i> Dahlstrom offers an insider&#146;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.&#160;<br><br>With all the bitterness and drama of the race between Ford Dodge and General Motors <i>Tractor Wars</i> is the untold story of industry stalwarts and disruptors inventors and administrators racing to invent modern agriculture&#151;a power farming revolution that would usher in a whole new world.