John Deere vs International Harvester: The 100-Year War That Built American Farming

In 1902, J.P. Morgan merged five farm equipment companies into the fourth-largest corporation in America. It commanded 85% of its market. Eighty-three years later, its agricultural division was sold off and the company vanished. The rival it was built to crush is now worth $65 billion a year. Two men, two blacksmith shops, six years apart. Neither knew the other existed. Neither knew he was about to build the company that would fight his own for a hundred years. One cracked the harvest with a machine that cut what human backs had cut for 3,000 years. The other forged a plow from a broken sawmill blade that scoured itself in prairie clay no iron plow could beat. This is the full story of the war between Cyrus McCormick and John Deere — the panic that started it, the strike that killed one of them, and the single management decision in 1979 that ended the fight forever. Two percent of America now feeds a country that once needed ninety percent to feed itself. This war is why.