where are the john deere tractors made at
John Deere As of 2014[update], Deere & Company employed about 67,000 people worldwide, of which half are in the United States and Canada, and is the largest agriculture machinery company in the world. In August 2014, the company announced it was indefinitely laying off 600 of its workers at plants in Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas due to less demand for its products.[20] Inside the United States, the company's primary locations are its administrative center in Moline, Illinois, and manufacturing factories in central and southeastern United States.[21] As of 2016[update], the company experiments with an electric farm tractor.[22]
Charles City, Iowa Charles City is known for the role it played in the history of the American tractor. A native son Charles Walter Hart, whose father owned three local farms,[5] met Charles H. Parr in college. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Hart and Parr developed a two-cylinder gasoline engine and set up their Hart-Parr Gasoline Engine Company in Charles City in 1897. It was here in 1901 the term "tractor" with Latin roots and a combination of the words traction and power[6] was first coined by Hart and Parr.[7] In 1903 the firm built fifteen "tractors", the first successful production-model tractor line in the U.S. The 14,000 pound No. 3 is the oldest surviving internal combustion engine tractor in the United States and is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington D.C.[8] In 1929, Hart-Parr was one of the four companies that merged to form Oliver Farm Equipment Company and finally the White Farm-New Idea Equipment Co. At its peak in the mid-1970s, the sprawling plant complex encompassed 23 acres and employed nearly 3,000 workers.[citation needed] The 1980s farm crisis and other economic pressures led to the closing of the plant in 1993. As of 2013, the vacant site stands ready for re-use.