Showing posts with label Hugh Bennett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hugh Bennett. Show all posts

Monday, July 19, 2010

John Deere Green




Cracker tracker has had moose before. But somehow this moose is different - being both Canadian and an homage to John Deere. John Deere was a blacksmith who escaped creditors by moving to Illinois. The local cast iron plows were no match for the hard soil of the area - the plows were the same technology used since the Chinese first cast iron plows in 233 BC. The cracker is cast in pewter using a similar gravity casting technique.

Deere wanted to improve on the 2000-year-old process and remembered polishing and sharpening needles for a tailor when he was a kid, so he developed a polished, sharpened steel-bladed plow. It became "The Plow that Broke the Plains" perhaps directly responsible for the dust bowl that ravished the area within 100 years - agricultural reform only happened when the dust reached Washington during the Senate's agricultural reform debate.