Recently I wrote about the political and economic parallels between the Roaring 1920s and today’s Turbulent 2020s. This week, the comparison shifts to machinery and markets — how, in both decades a century apart, a revolution in farm equipment collided head-on with falling commodity prices and soaring machinery costs. The rhyme is almost eerie: technological leaps meeting financial cliffs.
History never repeats itself cleanly, but the pattern is unmistakable. In both eras, farmers found themselves riding a wave of mechanical innovation at precisely the moment grain markets soured. The 1920s were the formative decade for the brands that would dominate global agriculture for the next hundred years.
Henry Ford, already transforming the world with the Model T, turned his attention to agriculture in 1917 with the Fordson Model F — the world’s first mass-produced tractor. Cheap, simple and aggressively priced, it flooded the globe and forced every other manufacturer to adapt or die.
International Harvester, born of the McCormick–Deering merger, countered with the 10-20 and 15-30 series — kerosene tractors that became the backbone of early Australian broadacre farming. John Deere, still largely a plough maker, bought the Waterloo Engine Company in 1923 and launched the Model D, setting the company on its future century-long trajectory.
If Fordson put wheels in the paddock, Rumely put raw power in it. The Rumely OilPull, famous for its heavy-oil engine, became a cult machine of the early 1920s. But Rumely overreached and, like so many firms battered by the commodity collapse, went under — eventually being absorbed by J.I. Case in 1931.
Towering over them all was the emergence of Caterpillar, born from the 1925 merger of Best and Holt — the pioneers of crawler tractors. Their early crawlers — the 2-Ton, 10-Ton, Thirty, Forty and the iconic Sixty — became the ancestors of every modern track machine from dozers to high-horsepower farm crawlers.
Horsepower was racing ahead too. In 1920, the typical broadacre tractor delivered 20–25 hp. By 1930, Caterpillar Thirtys and Fortys were pushing 35–45 hp, and the Sixty was hitting 60 hp. Headers also scaled rapidly: a Sunshine stripper cut six feet in 1920, but by 1930 pull-type combines were cutting 12 feet. Prices jumped accordingly — from £80–120 for a stripper to £350–450 for a combine within a decade, a 300–400 per cent rise driven by the same combination of innovation and inflation we see today.
Even the dream of self-propelled harvesting had already begun. Gleaner spent the 1920s experimenting with prototype SP machines — basically engines bolted onto modified combines. Fragile and expensive, they weren’t yet ready for prime time. The breakthrough came in 1938 when Massey-Harris released the No. 20, followed by the No. 21 — the first mass-produced SP combine and the moment one-man harvesting truly began.
A century later: the Turbulent Twenties
Fast-forward to today and the contrast is astounding. Modern articulated giants like the John Deere 9RX now reach 830 horsepower. New Holland’s CR11 can harvest in five minutes what a 1920s outfit struggled to do in a day. Seeding bars stretch to 120 feet — ten times the width of an early Shearer drill.
What the 1920s did with iron and kerosene, the 2020s have repeated with silicon, sensors, autonomy and eye-watering capital costs.
The market dominance is similar too. In the 1920s, three giants towered over the field: International Harvester, Fordson and John Deere. IH controlled over half the global binder and thresher market. Fordson sold more tractors in 1920 than all competitors combined. Deere surged after its Waterloo acquisition.
Today, the big three are once again unmistakable: John Deere, CNH Industrial and AGCO. Deere now turns over more than the next four machinery companies combined. CNH controls Case IH and New Holland with the broadest dealer footprint across the Western world. AGCO has consolidated an empire around Fendt, Massey Ferguson, Valtra and Gleaner. Kubota, via Kverneland and Escorts, dominates Asia and India, while CLAAS remains Europe’s combine specialist.
Commodity prices: then and now
Mechanisation in both eras arrived at the worst possible time.
In the 1920s, wheat collapsed from US $2.58 per bushel in 1919 to 80 cents by 1922. It clawed back to $1.40 in 1927 before sliding again — below 90 cents after the Wall Street Crash, and as low as 30–40 cents by 1931–32. A full-blown economic disaster.
A century later, the pattern is painfully familiar. Chicago wheat futures peaked at US $11.83 per bushel in May 2022 and have since retreated toward $5–6, even as machinery prices and operating costs rocket upward.
In both eras, farmers invested in bigger, better machinery just as the commodity cycle turned brutally against them.
Will history repeat?
The grim lesson of the Roaring Twenties is that a technological boom can mask an economic fragility — until it can’t. The decade ended not with prosperity but with a global crash and a long, grinding depression.
Today’s warning signs are impossible to ignore: an overheated stock market, rising debt levels, ballooning government deficits, tariff wars and geopolitical shocks. The machinery is bigger, the software smarter, but the underlying risks look disturbingly familiar.
A century may have passed, but some patterns never change.
Related story: The parallels between the Roaring 1920s and the Turbulent 2020s
