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2025 ADAO | Tractor Wars with Neil Dahlstrom · Closing Market Report

• 0:00
  Todd Gleason: Neil Dahlstrom is here. We're not gonna look forward, but backwards a little bit with him. He's the author of Tractor Wars. I know you probably heard me say, you know, if you've got the book, bring it with you. I wanted you to know where Neil was and to meet him just a little bit.
• 0:15
  He's gonna talk about tractor wars and then the documentary as well, that PBS in Iowa produced, which will air again at 07:00 on Tuesday next week and 02:00 on Wednesday. Neil, thank you for being here and taking some time with us. I appreciate it. The floor is yours for maybe ten minutes or so.
• 0:33
  Neil Dahlstrom: Okay. Thank you very much. I know I'm standing between you and a break, so we're gonna make this quick. Okay? We're just gonna cover a hundred and seventeen years of history in the next ten minutes.
• 0:43
  Is that fine with everybody? We'll go super fast. I I promise. It it's really amazing to me to to kinda listen to and and learn about autonomy, because there's so many parallels between this kind of technology journey. And for me, when you write a book that starts in nineteen o eight and ends in 1928, and you say, oh, this all sounds really familiar to me.
• 1:03
  This kind of adoption curve and this technology curve. And that's really what this book, Tractor Wars, is about. So, if you don't wanna hear the story, close your ears. Just plug plug your ears. Right?
• 1:14
  Because I don't wanna give it away. But, basically, the book ends are nineteen o eight. This young up and coming car manufacturer named Henry Ford, who no one's ever heard of, sends a a a photo and a paragraph to a publication called the Farm Implement News and says, I'm building a farm tractor. And it's and it's gonna be out really soon. And so you imagine people, you know, opening up the Farm Implement News and reading it and going, yeah.
• 1:37
  Okay. I think I've heard of this word tractor before. I don't know who this Henry Ford dude is, but, like, okay. Big deal. Well, a month later, Henry Ford rolls something else out called the Model t.
• 1:48
  And all of a sudden, a lot of people have heard of Henry Ford. But he's a farm kid. And that's kind of the beginning of this journey. The farm tractor industries, couple hundred machines from maybe six or seven manufacturers at that period in time. So that's kind of the starting point.
• 2:04
  The next important piece happens in nineteen o nine. Cyrus McCormick junior, the CEO of International Harvester, and William Butterworth, the CEO of John Deere have a meeting. Cyrus McCormick says, I heard that you're gonna get into the harvesting business. And if you do that, we're gonna go into the plow business. And William Butterworth says, no.
• 2:25
  We're not doing that. We'd never do that. But I heard that you're getting into the plow business, and if you do that, we're gonna go into the harvesting business. Of course, they're both doing this already behind the scenes. Right?
• 2:36
  So that kinda sets us up. International Harvester is 10 times the size of John Deere at the time. They're a hundred million dollar a year company, and this kind of triggers a lot of this what they're they're trying to build what they call a full line. So that's $19.00 9. Fast forward a little bit.
• 2:55
  The the farm tractor, not really widely adopted. We're talking about these big, what they call prairie tractors. They're sixty, seventy horsepower machines. They're in Canada. They're out west.
• 3:06
  In 1913, this company comes along called the Bull Tractor Company. And they do something amazing. They go, oh, the average farm size in The United States is 40 to 50 acres. Why don't we build a tractor that's suitable for the average size farmer? This is what an editor called the gorgeous nightmare period, which is everything just went chaotic.
• 3:25
  Now every entrepreneur, every technology person, every ag, implement manufacturer decides they're getting into the tractor business. The bull sells a whopping 3,000 tractors in 1913. Five years later, they're bankrupt because it turns out building a tractor is really, really hard. Where's Henry Ford? Still trying to design a farm tractor because it turns out that building a farm tractor is really, really hard.
• 3:47
  Takes him all the way until 1918. John Deere starts r and d in 1912. They introduced their first farm tractor in 1918 and that's where this started with me. People would say, what took John Deere so long to get into the tractor business? And I would say, well, 1918 feels really early to me, and they were before the people who were after them, but they were after the people who were before them.
• 4:11
  That meant Neil doesn't know the answer, so he's gonna try to confuse you. That's what really started the research. So John Deere gets into the business. International Harvester is the big player. By 1925, there's a 60 tractor manufacturers in the in The United States.
• 4:28
  They're building 200,000 tractors a year. Henry Ford has 75% market share. He introduces the Fordson in 1918. He's got 75% market share. The industry is evolving.
• 4:42
  We had things happen like a world war, a global pandemic, all of these things, all this context, which is really important, an ag recession, price wars in the early nineteen twenties. So there's a lot going on in this period. Henry Ford starts hemorrhaging market share in the automobile business and has to make a decision. So he goes from 75% market share in 1925 to almost nothing in 1928 because he withdraws from the tractor industry and we start over. International Harvester's at the top again.
• 5:16
  Deere's number two. They're selling about 75 to 80% and everyone else is trying to figure it out. That's the entire book in about five minutes. Hopefully, we did okay there. You followed me.
• 5:28
  So that led to this great call I got about a year and a half ago from Iowa PBS, who's who, the one of one of their producers says, well, I got your book for Christmas. Have you ever thought about doing a documentary? And I said, no, because I don't know how to do documentaries. But that kind of led down this road of producing this documentary with PBS that came out last year. And as of, I think, a day ago, two days ago, it's being released nationally.
• 5:56
  So hopefully, everyone's gonna get to see this documentary, and I'm really excited about it.