Oh Deere
The afternoon excursion rounded out some of my previous knowledge about one of the Quad Cities’ most famous companies and families, John Deere. I had been to the Grand Detour on the Rock River where Deere arrived from Vermont in 1837 to forge a self-scouring steel plow. There were others about the same time who developed similar steel plows. One was Abraham Brokaw in Bloomington who said, “this is so good it will sell itself”; the Quad Cities offered Deere land along the Mississippi and “nothing runs like a Deere” proved a better marketing slogan than “it will sell itself.” While neither John nor his son and successor had ever seen a tractor, by the 1920s the company started producing them, rather like its Peoria competitor.
I’ve also been to Deere in Beijing, usually one of my last stops on student trips. It provided a healthy corrective to the China as Michigan Avenue view of China. At the time Cat executives were grappling with relatively high prices, in a country dominated by small farms and cheaper competitors.
It was interesting to see the Deere family houses and the evolution of corporate agriculture. The multi- million dollar ones are fully automatic with incredible man-hours saving. However, the machinery is not for Jefferson’s yeoman farmers.. The corporation is no longer a family business but the last family ceo managed to keep headquarters in the Quad Cities and donate the huge family homes. 25000 feet as civic treasures and a meeting place for not for profits.