He Was ‘Wheat King of the World,’ But Is Mostly Forgotten

 

Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.

As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.

I doubt you have ever heard of him, however. I lived in Montana for 22 years and never heard of him. I have friends who lived there much longer who drew a blank when I brought up his name.

Yet in 1919, a story in Everybody’s Magazine, “200,000 Acres and Not a Single Horse,” was adulatory (Campbell had 200,000 acres at his disposal but cultivated about half of them).[1] In 1928, he was on the cover of Time Magazine. In 1935, a Fortune writer featured Campbell in a long story on breaking the sod, saying, “without Tom Campbell the tractor would have been a different and an inferior thing.”[2] That is because Campbell was the first to buy a lot of heavy farming equipment and he used his engineering acumen and powerful personality to insist on quality and durability. In 1949, he was the “wheat king of the world,” according to Harper’s Magazine.[3]

Some of the adulation continued after his death. “It is my opinion that Campbell deserves the title of the monarch of mechanized, industrialized, large-scale agriculture,” wrote Hiram Drache in Agricultural History in 1977, and he anointed him the “plower of the plains.“[4]

In 2003, Deborah Fitzgerald devoted a chapter of her book Every Farm a Factory to Campbell’s farming operation. To Fitzgerald, he epitomized the early twentieth-century movement toward industrial agriculture, the subject of her book. “He represented a hybrid of two traditions, engineering and farming, and he showed that the two had much in common,” she wrote. “His long-term success is compelling evidence for the soundness of his views.”[5]

Yet today, the headquarters of one of his big farm units, Camp No. 4, is just part of a museum in the small town of Hardin, Montana. Why do so few people know about him?

If you will bear with me, here’s a suggestion.

One of the lessons I learned when I was a journalist was that it’s great to get a story first—the “scoop”—but if other journalists don’t follow you, it’s not a scoop and you have a credibility problem. Similarly, it’s a coup to have the biggest wheat farm in the United States, but if it’s not something other farmers want (or dare) to try, you may be “on the wrong side of history,” rather than the herald of change. According to the Wall Street Journal, Frahm Farmlands, one of the largest farms in the United States today, has 30,600 acres in Kansas. That is less than a third of Campbell’s acreage.

Economist Peter J. Hill points out that while modern farms are mechanized, they are still, for the most part, family farms. (Indeed, Frahm Farmlands’ website describes itself as a “6th generation family farm.”) Not only did Campbell’s farm find few duplicates, but the “bonanza farms” of the previous era, which started the industrialization of farming, have largely disappeared, too. [6]

In addition, Campbell’s farm may not have been the success that it appeared to be. As Terry Anderson pointed out (in the same journal as Drache), after four years of no profits, J. P. Morgan let Campbell buy the ranch for “seventeen cents on the dollar.”[8] Thus, much of Campbell’s initial capital was essentially free; by leasing Indian land he avoided taxes (and possibly paid  low rents); and he benefited from payments from  Soviet visitors. Although the company operated until the 1980s (and the company bought land in New Mexico in the 1930s), the historians I’ve read have not revealed how many years the farm  made money. While wheat can be grown with  an average rainfall of 14 inches or less, years of drought can be devastating, and Montana had them .

Even so, Campbell was an engaging and brilliant entrepreneur, and he had a long run. There’s no doubt that he was efficient, he knew machines, and he managed his labor well. Why he is ignored still puzzles me. I invite your thoughts.

(My second article on Thomas Campbell, “Was Thomas Campbell Duped?”  can be found here.)

Notes

[1] Robert H. Moulton, “200,000 Acres and Not a Single Horse.” Everybody’s Magazine 41, no. 1 (July) 1919, 47. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Everybody_s_Magazine/6ZnPAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[2] “Grasslands:The Broken Sod,” Fortune, April 1935,  65-66, 185-90, at  185. Drache (below) identifies the Fortune writer as Archibald MacLeish.

[3] “Joseph Kinsley Howard, “Tom Campbell:  Farmer of Two Continents,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1949, 55-63, at 56. 

[4] Hiram Drache, “Thomas D. Campbell: The Plower of the Plains,” Agricultural History 51, no. 1 (1977): 78-91,  at 70n, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3741634.

[5] Deborah Fitzgerald,  Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale, 2003).

[6] Douglas W. Allen and Dean Lueck, The Nature of the Farm: Contracts, Risk, and Organization in Agriculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

[7] Terry L. Anderson,  “Bonanza Farmers and Subsistence: A Response.” Agricultural History 51, no. 1 (1977): 104-08, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3741636.

Image: Thomas D. Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. Photo courtesy of the Bighorn County Historical  Museum, Hardin, Montana.