If the reader has rural roots, no matter where, an Anglo-Saxon name will undoubtedly be part of his sentimental DNA: John Deere. The American who named this legendary brand of tractors and machinery for farmers is the Henry Ford of plows. If Ford revolutionized the automotive industry with the Model T, John Deere’s successors did something similar with the Waterloo Boy, the company’s first tractor.
But we have come a long way in history. It all began when little Johnny was the son of a tailor in Rutland, Vermont, where he was born in 1804 (the country still had to experience the annexation of much of Mexico, a civil war, the conquest of the West and the decline of the Indians). That boy, who would soon lose his father and became a young blacksmith, discovered that there is nothing like a well-sharpened tool.
“Whether you need to sew or cut down a tree, do it with the right needle and axe,” said the man who would transform the task of felling. As incredible as it may seem today, plows had evolved very little and were still made of wood with wrought iron pieces. This system was especially unproductive in the hard soil of the Midwest in general, and Illinois in particular, where our man moved in 1836.
The wood got stuck in those clay lands and turned the farmers’ work into a very painful and unproductive task. A plow with a polished steel share, our entrepreneur told himself, would be more efficient. Farmers who trusted his first model, which he designed in 1837, quickly agreed with him. The Deere plow allowed more land to be tilled in less time and with less effort. An empire was born.
In 1847, long before Henry Ford began to create his legend, John Deere was already beginning to manufacture chain plows, en masse. Shortly after he exported them to half the world. In 1855, about 10,000 units left his factory, an outrage for the time. The polished steel share gave way to other innovations, such as spring mechanisms to adjust to the depth of each terrain and multi-disc implements.
But those innovative plows were, above all, the springboard for the firm to take its great leap forward with the mass production of tractors. John Deere died in 1886, at the age of 82, but the company remained in the hands of his heirs, who made it the leader of the world tractor industry, as explained in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the great custodian of John Deere’s memory. USA
Deere and Company entered tractor manufacturing with the 1918 purchase of the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company. It was a controversial operation. Shareholders were reticent about the future of these mechanical cars and continued to trust in animal traction, more or less like Illinois farmers continued to trust in plows that looked like they came from the Middle Ages until the Deere model of 1837 arrived.
And if that plow transformed the lives of millions of farmers around the world, the same thing happened with the following designs of an increasingly ambitious factory. The Waterloo Boy model N was produced between 1917 and 1924. Its two-cylinder engine, which ran on kerosene, cheaper than gasoline, allowed it to develop 25 horsepower. It had two forward gears and one reverse gear.
An email asking the origin of the curious name of Waterloo Boy has so far gone unanswered by the Smithsonian Institution and the John Deere Forum in Mannheim, Germany, headquarters of the company’s headquarters in Europe. Be that as it may, the Waterloo Boy passed the baton starting in 1923 to the John Deere D, the first model in a long chain named after the patriarch.
Tractor D also ran on kerosene and weighed more than two tons, despite which it was very manoeuvrable. It had a two-cylinder engine that produced 15 horsepower at the drawbar and 22 at the belt. In the mid-1920s, a farmer could get one for a thousand dollars. The D had a direct competitor in another lighter, mass-produced product, the Fordson (from Ford and Son, Ford and Son).
There were more competitors to Ford and Deere itself, such as the manufacturers Hart-Parr, McCormick-Deering and Rumely, to name the most important ones. His designs made the change in the field irreversible. In 1903, with the pioneering Hart-Parr machinery, farmers discovered steam harvesters (like the ones shown in the first photo of this report, from the Library of Congress archives).
Only a few years intervened between those gadgets and the lighter and more practical internal combustion ones. Most farmers did not need large vehicles, but versatile and easy to repair vehicles, which led to the arrival of dealers. It is very likely that at dinner last night or at lunch today we consumed products made with a John Deere, the leader in the sector, with 12 factories around the world.
John Deere Ibérica operated between 1963 and 1994. Ebro, Lanz, Barreiros also succumbed… But, unlike these brands, which disappeared, the American multinational closed in Spain (“it relocated”, we would say now) and concentrated its production in other countries . Its exports today allow its vehicles to continue to be part of countless agricultural landscapes, with its logo of a deer in full leap.
Some farmers believe there is almost an oligopoly in the hands of John Deere and other giants, such as Massey Ferguson and New Holland, the result of the merger of the agricultural divisions of Fiat and Ford. That would explain its almost omnipresence in Spanish fields. Surely if an apprentice tailor, converted into a blacksmith and plow innovator, could respond, he would say: “Whatever you do, do it with a well-sharpened tool.”