John Deere celebrates 100 years of tractors

No celebration of 100 years of John Deere tractors would be complete without featuring the company’s first tractor, the Waterloo Boy from 1918.

John Deere used a video screen suspended above its equipment display to blend new and old at the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, Ky. This photo of the screen shows an advertisement promoting power steering, which was a big deal in the early 1950s.

An image of a classic John Deere tractor hangs over today’s modern offerings as farmers check out both old and new equipment displays at the National Farm Machinery Show.

Are you old enough to remember John Deere Days? These events date back to the 1930s. Deere dealers held open houses and showed films of farmer testimonials and other features. Hollywood actors appeared in some of the later films. It was more than a discount day to buy parts. For many communities, John Deere Days was a local happening people looked forward to every year.

The tractor cultivating on the screen is a distant ancestor of the new John Deere workhorse that visitors to the National Farm Machinery Show are checking out on the floor. Perhaps one of these visitor’s grandfathers or even great-great-grandfathers drove a tractor like the one in the black-and-white film suspended over the modern John Deere display.

The future of John Deere changed forever in 1960. Some might argue it marked a change in technology across all of agriculture. John Deere introduced the “New Generation of Power,” tractors with more than two cylinders, to dealers in Dallas, Texas, with as much glitz and glamour as was possible at the time.

Here is a 1960 John Deere 2010 plowing in a field during a demonstration. The 2010 was part of the new line of John Deere tractors introduced in 1960 to replace the two-cylinder models of the past.

The 4010 was the leader of the line, the best fit for many farms, in 1960 when John Deere introduced its “New Generation of Power.” The model that replaced it, the 4020, became an icon in agricultural tractor history.

John Deere tractors from the 1950s and 1960s still sell well at auctions. A restored John Deere 4020 brought more than $12,000 at a farm sale last fall.

This 30-year-old John Deere tractor still performs well at Purdue University’s Throckmorton ag research center. It pulls a planter equipped with Precision Planting technology.

This 9R Series tractor on tracks is shown at the 2017 Farm Progress Show in Decatur, Ill. Believe it or not, its roots go back to the Waterloo Boy, shown at the beginning of this slideshow.