Last November The New York Times reported on a massive mountain of corn 60 feet high and as wide as a football field. It's one of 11 similar piles in Iowa growing as a result of excess corn. The Times blamed federal farm subsidies for the eagerness of farmers to flood the market with their produce. But it's hard to tell a farmer not to do what he does best—maximize the output of his land. Unfortunately, those mounds of corn in Iowa reveal the irony of the agriculture economy. The better farmers do their job, the more they produce, the cheaper their goods, and the more seed they sow.

American farmers have been dealing with this irony since at least the 1860s. "The latter third of the nineteenth century might well be called the age of paradox in American agricultural history," writes David Vaught in his introduction to Neil and Jeremy Dahlstrom's The John Deere Story: A Biography of Plowmakers John & Charles Deere. "Farm output, after doubling between 1840 and 1860, more than tripled from 1860 to 1900, yet for farmers themselves this was a time of deep and bitter discontent."

As Midwestern farmers tamed the prairie, blacksmith John Deere was there to provide the singing blade that would cut through tough soil. And as output increased and prices dropped, those farmers who grew to rely on manufactured farm implements turned John's son Charles into one of the tycoons of the Gilded Age. The Deere company's story is the story of the transformation of American farming from yeoman to agribusiness, and the transformation of an invention into a feel-good American icon.

John Deere was born in Rutland, Vermont, on February 7, 1804. His father disappeared in 1808 after leaving to collect an inheritance in England; he was never to be heard from again. With five brothers and sisters, John and his family worked hard to make ends meet. In Rutland, he learned the Puritan values of hard work and honesty, which he would carry with him to Illinois. At age 17, John apprenticed with a local blacksmith, and after four years became a journeyman for another village shop.

As John grew up, Vermont no longer held the opportunities that had attracted an earlier generation of settlers. He made several attempts at starting his own blacksmith shop but always came out on the losing end, once even selling out to his employee. He married and his family grew, but all the while he was sinking deeper and deeper into debt. In November 1836, John was arrested for defaulting on a $78.76 loan. Out on bail, he had little choice but to leave his family behind and search for better opportunities on the Illinois prairie.

Deere not only found work but also new challenges for his enterprising mind. "Unlike the sandy New England soil," the Dahlstroms observe, "prairie soil stuck to both the share and the moldboard [of the plow]. Illinois soil was fertile for the initial breaking of the land, but following seasons revealed a stubborn, sticky loam that grew more resistant year after year. … The farmers resorted to carrying a wooden paddle and stopping every few yards to scrape the sticky soil from the moldboards."

Deere thought there had to be a better way than the oxen-pulled prairie breaker for farmers to plow their fields. While doing the traditional blacksmith's work of shoeing horses, repairing wagon wheels, and manufacturing iron goods, he considered how to build a better plow. In what has become American legend, Deere had an epiphany during a visit to his hometown Grand Detour Hydraulic Mill. He noticed the broken blade of a steel saw and asked to take it home:

Deere cut the teeth off the long blade with a hand chisel, striker, and sledge, then heated one small section at a time and molded it with a hammer and attached the steel blade to an iron moldboard.

He attached the moldboard to a wooden beam, to which he added two handles. So simple—but powerfully effective.

Deere's 1837 creation wasn't the first steel plow, and John never claimed to have invented it. Others had bolted or otherwise used steel to cut the soil, but Deere's  design was the best. His plow stayed clean and sharp and was said to sing as it cut through the tough prairie soil. When work as a blacksmith once again became harder to find, Deere began slowly shifting into the plow-making business. He built 10 plows in 1839, 40 plows in 1840, and by 1842 Deere was hammering out 100 plows.

Though Deere was the quintessential blacksmith, he was also a good businessman: "His inventiveness, as he would prove over and over again throughout his life, consisted of taking solid products, greatly improving them, and then marketing the new product more effectively and less expensively than his competitors." Deere traveled across the Midwest from fair to fair selling his plows and consulting farmers about how to improve them. His 1867 design would remain in the Deere & Company product line until the 1940s, a testament to his engineering skill.

Deere, along with other agricultural businesses, helped to improve American farming dramatically. New markets opened as railroads and canals were able to transport goods from the Midwest to the East coast. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of farms in Illinois doubled, and those across the nation climbed from one and a half million to two million. But the United States was also making its transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. At the same time, John Deere fought with several business partners before heading out on his own and preparing his son, the graduate of a Chicago business school, to lead the company into America's Industrial Revolution.

In 1858, at age 21, Charles Deere took over the Moline Plow Works, which had grown to more than 65 workers building more than 13,400 plows worth $140,000. Charles led the company through the Civil War as well as the economic depressions, strained labor-management relations, and increased competition of the following decades. Charles would both protect and market the company's reputation for quality and honesty that John had earned over 30 years of plowmaking. While John shifted his energies toward politics and enjoying the fruits of his success, he was never long away from the company's blacksmith shop.

Success attracts imitators. John Deere had stenciled his "Moline Plow" with "John Deere, Moline, ILL." on the beam since he had moved his business to Moline, early in his plowmaking days. But while Charles was at the helm, a newly started Moline plow company began using a similar stencil on its plows, which were made by a former blacksmith in John Deere's shop.

Charles Deere was furious that a competitor would not only steal his designs and brandings but try to profit from Deere's hard-earned trust with customers. It wasn't just the plows and stencils that were similar: Candee, Swan & Co. even produced a catalogue that was almost an exact copy of Deere's.

Charles responded by taking out ads warning customers of bad imitations of the Moline Plow. But when he caught a spy trying to steal the company's plow designs, Charles went to court to protect not only his father's designs but also the image of his company.

Charles Deere filed suit against Candee, Swan for trademark infringement. Deere had never filed for a patent for his plow designs, so the company could only sue over copied words, letters, and the numbering system Deere used for the interchangeable parts on some of its plows, all of which Charles Deere considered its own trademark. Deere also fought an advertising battle with Candee, Swan, saying "the only genuine Moline Plows are made by us, and are branded: John Deere, Moline. ILL."

The next month a judge ruled that though Candee, Swan had copied almost exactly Deere's markings and only replaced "John Deere" with its own name, the Deere company had no exclusive right to the words Moline, ILL. and could not claim to make the only Moline Plow.

Denied, Charles filed suit again and launched an even more aggressive advertising campaign. Even as Deere's Moline Plow Works fought to uphold its claim to quality and history, the company was doing good business, opening branches in other Midwestern cities. Meanwhile, Charles, realizing the importance of the history and presumed virtue of his father, reorganized the company, renaming it Deere & Company. It was also time for a new logo, and John Deere and Moline city engineer Melvin Gould came up with the design: a deer jumping over a log with the words "John Deere, Moline, ILL."

Though Charles again lost his suit, he learned important business lessons. "Deere & Company's claim to its heritage, its integrity, and the quality of its products were all essential to the company's reputation," the Dahlstroms note. In the future, Charles Deere would continue the John Deere tradition of constant improvements and the development of new products. He would also establish the company's ongoing claim to honesty and good value.

While times had changed, and quality, honesty, and virtue were qualities to be marketed rather than earned, Charles Deere did his best to maintain the values his father had given the company, treating employees well while keeping prices down and quality high. Deere & Company remained a family business based in Moline. When Charles Deere died in 1907, his company had 1,400 employees and made more steel plows than his eight largest competitors combined. In 1918, the company entered the tractor business. And in 1982, when most of the country thought of John Deere as a maker of riding lawn mowers, the company hired its first non-family member as president.

The John Deere name has become the agricultural equivalent of baseball and apple pie. Faces alight each time I tell visitors to the blacksmith shop where I volunteer that John Deere was the maker of the first widely used steel plow. While the company's green and yellow tractors heap grain and corn into monstrous accumulations that would have stunned 19th-century farmers, and giant agribusinesses develop ever more complex strains of genetically modified crops, "John Deere" perhaps offers reassurance that not everything has changed under the imperious demands of progress.

Rob Moll is an associate editor at Christianity Today magazine.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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