Tractor Wars
John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture
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Narrated by:
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Brian Holsopple
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By:
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Neil Dahlstrom
About this listen
Discover the untold story of the “tractor wars”, the 20-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 to 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 20th 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.
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"Mr. Dahlstrom has written a superb history of the tractor and this long-forgotten period of capitalism in US agriculture. We now know the whole story of when farming, business and the free-market economy diverged, divided and conquered." (Wall Street Journal)
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- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.
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Somehow the author manages to stay balanced
- By Emily C on 05-28-14
By: Russell Gold
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Faster, Higher, Farther
- The Volkswagen Scandal
- By: Jack Ewing
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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A shocking exposé of Volkswagen's fraud by the New York Times reporter who covered the scandal. In mid-2015 Volkswagen proudly reached its goal of surpassing Toyota as the world's largest automaker. A few months later, the EPA disclosed that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million cars that deceived emissions-testing mechanisms. By early 2017 VW had settled with American regulators and car owners for $20 billion, with additional lawsuits still looming.
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Excellent recap of VW, its structure and culture
- By Northern IN Mark on 05-27-17
By: Jack Ewing
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Engines of Change
- A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars
- By: Paul Ingrassia
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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America was made manifest by its cars. From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66 and Jack Kerouac, America's history is a vehicular history-an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by the acclaimed author of Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster.
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Cars, Computers, and "Engines of Change"
- By Joshua Kim on 06-17-12
By: Paul Ingrassia
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Driving Honda
- Inside the World’s Most Innovative Car Company
- By: Jeffrey Rothfeder
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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For decades there have been two iconic Japanese auto companies. One has been endlessly studied and written about. The other has been generally underappreciated and misunderstood. Until now. Since its birth as a motorcycle company in 1949, Honda has steadily grown into the world’s fifth largest automaker and top engine manufacturer, as well as one of the most beloved, most profitable, and most consistently innovative multinational corporations.
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it was ok.
- By chris p on 11-16-18
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Drive!
- Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age
- By: Lawrence Goldstone
- Narrated by: Christopher Price
- Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed author of Birdmen comes a revelatory new history of the birth of the automobile - an illuminating and entertaining true tale of invention, competition, and the visionaries, hustlers, and swindlers who came together to transform the world. With a narrative as propulsive as its subject, Drive! plunges us headlong into a time unlike any in history, when manic innovation and consumerist zeal coalesced to forever change the way people got from one place to another.
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Ford Detractor.
- By Eric Johnston on 08-15-22
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Behemoth
- A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
- By: Joshua B. Freeman
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills". Many factories that operated over the last two centuries - such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn - were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production.
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Get rid of the fake accents
- By J. R. Valery on 03-13-18
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Car Wars
- The Rise, the Fall, and the Resurgence of the Electric Car
- By: John Fialka
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The resurgence of the electric car in modern life is a tale of adventurers, men and women who bucked the complete dominance of the fossil-fueled car to seek something cleaner, simpler and cheaper. Award-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter John Fialka documents the early days of the electric car, from the MIT/Caltech race between prototypes in the summer of 1968 to the 1987 victory of the Sunraycer in the world's first race featuring solar-powered cars.
By: John Fialka
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Hershey
- Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams
- By: Michael D'Antonio
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In this compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D'Antonio gives us the real-life rags-to-riches story of Milton S. Hershey, a largely uneducated businessman whose idealistic sense of purpose created an immense financial empire, a town, and a legacy that lasts to this day.
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The Benchmark for Chartiable, Rich Men
- By Boyd Tschaggeny on 01-30-19
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Nature's Metropolis
- Chicago and the Great West
- By: William Cronon
- Narrated by: Jonah Cummings
- Length: 18 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
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Moving
- By JB on 02-09-18
By: William Cronon
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I Invented the Modern Age
- The Rise of Henry Ford and the Most Important Car Ever Made
- By: Richard Snow
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In many ways, Henry Ford's story is well-known; in many more ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a fascinating narrative of Ford's rise to fame through his greatest invention, the Model T. A highly pleasurable listen, filled with scenes and incidents from Ford's life, I Invented the Modern Age shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know it.
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A Complicated Man
- By Jean on 11-23-13
By: Richard Snow
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The Big Roads
- The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
- By: Earl Swift
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From author Earl Swift comes the surprising history of the U.S. interstate system, a fascinating route through the dreams, discoveries, and protests that shaped these mighty roads.
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Lessons from The Big Roads
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
By: Earl Swift
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The Meat Racket
- The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business
- By: Christopher Leonard
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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How much do you know about the meat on your dinner plate? Journalist Christopher Leonard spent more than a decade covering the country's biggest meat companies, including four years as the national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. Now he delivers the first comprehensive look inside the industrial meat system, exposing how a handful of companies executed an audacious corporate takeover of the nation's meat supply.
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Hits the nail on the head.
- By Anonymous 8888 on 02-04-15
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Crash Course
- The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
- By: Paul Ingrassia
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves? Ingrassia also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work).
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Contemporary History at Its Best
- By Roy on 04-19-10
By: Paul Ingrassia
What listeners say about Tractor Wars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jerry Stauffer
- 02-12-22
It was a changing time
In our age of industrial agriculture it is hard to imagine a time when the horse reigned supreme and the tractor was a new and highly controversial innovation. This book details the invention of the tractor, early pioneers, early failures and the eventual rise of the Fordson, the McCormick Deering 10-20 and 15-30 with their companion the Farmall and the John Deere D and GP.
The descriptions of early factories that produced one machine at a time and producers who made less than 10 machines a year seem almost unbelievable today. The internal squabbles in the various companies of whether to build a tractor and what that machine should look like are stories unfamiliar. The book ends in the late 1920s and begs a sequel. It's thought provoking, informative and I recommend it.
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- Coley Hitt
- 03-01-24
Good book on tractors
Good book on tractors, lots of Ford history. Not really long enough. They only get up to like the 30’s. So it is only the birth of modern tractors.
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- Anonymou
- 06-21-22
Not very cohesive
Jumped all over the place and was hard to follow. Wish is covered a long history and not just the formative years. A bit of a let down.
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- Todd
- 01-24-24
Fascinating history
It’s a fascinating story of how the tractor came about and the impact on modern farming. It also connects the need for the tractor with more and more Americans moving to the city in the early 20th century. It was a little hard to follow at times and the story felt like it got off tangent at times.
Overall, a good book, but may require more focus to listen to.
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- Lyle
- 06-23-23
Really enjoyed this book having grown up on a farm with these tractors.
The early started slow because I did not grow up with these tractors but I still own a Ford 8N of my grandfather, it got better and better as it went on.
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- Christian N Yancey
- 06-21-22
Great Read for Agricultural History Buffs
I wrote my senior thesis as a History major on the impact of the early tractor. Great book
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- Evan
- 02-22-22
Evan's Review
Good book I enjoyed the book. I recommend this book if you are interested in agriculture and History. I hope the will continue writ>ng beginning with 1930 and come forward.
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- James H. Ruff
- 03-15-23
tractor Wars 2 - 1920 to 2020
Simply a great book on the early history of the agricultural tractor industry in the U.S
Today I believe Deere has an overwhelming marketshare but don’t quite understand the reasons. Perhaps a second book that details the factors for their dominance from the early 20’s is needed.
Also, what are their greatest threats for the future?
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- Darren Sapp
- 05-08-22
Love this History!
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. Holsopple's narration is spot on!
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- chris meyer
- 07-19-22
Love it
Coming from small town America farming has always been a part of my life! It was a great book with awesome history. It relates to every industry and those who make the decisions that affect how the future will be come reality. Farming has made the USA what it is today and it was very interesting to hear how long it took for adoption of the tractor to come about
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