WAFarmers CEO Trevor Whittington sees plenty of similarities between the Roaring Twenties a century ago and what the world is experiencing now
History rarely repeats itself cleanly, yet the farming parallels between the Roaring Twenties and our own Turbulent Twenties are impossible to miss.
A century divides the decades, but the story is nearly identical: a machinery revolution arrives just as commodity prices fall through the floor.
The steel wheels and kerosene engines of the 1920s have become the silicon processors and AI-driven farm machinery of today – and in both eras, farmers have found themselves riding a wave of technological progress at precisely the moment the grain market turns sour.
The 1920s were the formative decade for the machinery brands that would dominate global agriculture for the next hundred years.
Henry Ford, already reshaping the world with the Model T, turned his attention to farming in 1917 with the Fordson Model F – the world’s first mass-produced tractor.
Cheap, simple and aggressively priced, it flooded global markets and forced older manufacturers to innovate or disappear.
International Harvester, created from the merger of McCormick and Deering, countered with the 10-20 and 15-30 series – kerosene-burning tractors that became the backbone of early broadacre farming in Australia.
John Deere, still primarily a plough maker, bought the Waterloo Engine Company in 1923 and launched the now-iconic Model D, setting the company on a century-long trajectory.
If Fordson brought wheels to the paddock, Rumely brought raw power.
The Rumely OilPull, famous for its heavy-oil engines, became a technological cult machine of the early 1920s.
But Rumely overreached financially and, like so many manufacturers battered by post-war commodity collapse, went under before J.I. Case acquired it in 1931.
Overshadowing them all was the emergence of Caterpillar, born from the 1925 merger of California’s two great crawler pioneers, Best and Holt.
Both firms had spent years perfecting track-laying tractors, and their union created the Caterpillar Tractor Company.
Its early crawlers – the 2-Ton, 10-Ton, Thirty, Forty and the iconic Sixty – became the mechanical ancestors of every modern track machine from dozers to Quadtracs.
Even within that decade, horsepower was racing ahead.
In 1920 a typical broadacre tractor such as the Fordson or International 10-20 delivered 20-25 hp, but by 1930 farmers were running Caterpillar Thirtys and Fortys at 35-45 hp, with the Cat Sixty stretching to 60 hp.
Headers scaled rapidly in the 1920s.
A Sunshine stripper carried a 6-foot front in 1920, yet by 1930 the new pulltype combines were cutting 12-foot swaths, doubling working width and tripling throughput.
Prices skyrocketed too – from £80-120 for a stripper in 1920 to £350-450 for a combine by 1930.
This was a 300-400 per cent increase in just a decade, driven by the same mix of innovation and inflation farmers face today.
Long before the modern header fully took shape, the dream of self-propelled harvesting had already begun to stir.
Gleaner, then a small but inventive American firm, experimented throughout the 1920s with early SP concepts – essentially bolting engines onto modified combines.
The prototypes proved the idea but were fragile, underpowered and too costly for broadacre use.
The breakthrough finally came in 1938, when Massey-Harris released the No. 20, the world’s first commercially viable self-propelled combine.
Its successor, the No. 21, became the first mass-produced SP model, launching the era of one-man harvesting that still defines farming today.
Fast-forward to the Turbulent Twenties and the contrast is staggering.
Today’s articulated giants like the John Deere 9RX push 830 horsepower, working alongside modern headers such as the New Holland CR11 – machines capable of harvesting in five minutes what a 1920s outfit struggled to achieve in an entire day.
The horsepower gap tells the same story: from 60hp to 830hp – a fifteen-fold leap.
Today’s biggest seeding bars, at 120 feet, are ten times the width of the standard Shearer drills of the era, although the first twin-hitch combinations and Sunshine’s 15-foot “big-box” models were already hinting at the scale to come.
Yet mechanisation landed at the worst possible time.
Wheat prices crashed from US$2.58 per bushel in 1919 to just 80 cents by 1922.
By 1927 wheat was still barely half the post war average at US$1.40, but slipped to US$1.00 by mid-1929, fell below 90 cents after the Wall Street Crash, and by 1931-32 was trading at 30-40 cents – an economic catastrophe.
A century later the pattern is all too familiar.
Chicago wheat futures soared to a high of US$11.83 per bushel in May 2022 and have since retreated towards US$5-6, even as machinery prices, power ratings and operating costs have exploded.
In both eras, farmers embraced bigger, better machines just as the commodity cycle turned brutally against them.
The worry now is that the Turbulent Twenties don’t finish the way the 1920s did – with a global crash and a decade of depression.
The warning signs are uncomfortably familiar: rising debt, ballooning deficits, tariff wars and geopolitical shocks.
A century on, some patterns never change.