Dream Reaper: The Story of an Old-Fashioned Inventor in the High-Tech, High-Stakes World of Mo Dern Agriculture

by Craig Canine

Book Overview

Dream Reaper follows Mark Underwood, farmer and inventor, and his salesman cousin as they strive to perfect and market Mark's breakthrough invention, the Bi-Rotor combine. "This intriguing tale weaves... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679412727
• ISBN13: 9780679412724
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Is The Old-Fashioned Inventor Obsolete?

Today's inventor and entrepreneur faces a difficult series of hurdles on the road from conception to production. In more and more areas, a new obstacle is being added. Due to various economic forces, the number of companies that may purchase or license your patent is decreasing. In some fields two or three giant corporations dominate the market. If they turn you down, and the costs to develop your invention are high, are you locked out of the market? This book relates the story of how for thirteen years two men, inventor Mark Underwood and his cousin Ralph Langren, a sales and marketing specialist, fought the battle to develop and market their Bi Rotor combine. If you think all the problems of harvesting grain were solved by Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper, this book's review of the history of harvesting will give you a fascinating new picture that your school books did not provide. In one lifetime (McCormick's) farming went from medieval tools to mechanical reapers, and from nine of ten Americans living on a farm to the farmer becoming a minority of the population. Incidentally, McCormick did not invent the basic reaper. But as the book points out, he was "a great inventor, a master salesman, a prophet of mass production, and a robber baron, all rolled into one." What Kansas dirt farmer Mark Underwood did was to reinvent the combine (a combine is called that because it combines reaping, threshing, and winnowing). He was inspired, as a high school senior when working a summer job, by a drum type mixer used to mix cement, sand, and gravel. For nine years he sketched and turned the idea over in his head. In 1989 he was awarded a $20,000 grant by the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation and was able to build a two-thirds size model. When testing the first model they quickly discovered a way to clean the grain in the same operation. Other developments, such as the self leveling sieve soon came about. The book details the privations endured for years as they built ever improved prototypes. Finding funding for these prototypes was an unending battle. They approached the big and the small, Ross Perot, John Deere, International Harvester, and Caterpillar. They finally scored by offering limited partnerships to small investors and with a development deal with Caterpillar. The book is not only loaded with penetrating looks into the progress in agriculture but with looks at the vital relationship between the inventor and the entrepreneur. It points out that when a partnership is formed between the typically passive, compulsive perfectionist inventor and an aggressive, systematic entrepreneur, there is no limit to what can be achieved. The story of how and why grain elevators came to dominate the landscape is a must read. Also, how grain elevators led to a grain grading system and in turn how this led to futures trading is not only interesting history, but will give you an understanding of some of the headlines in today's financial pages. There

Surprise!! A Riveting Read!

I picked this up on an anonymous recommendation and am now wholeheartedly praising it to anyone who will listen! The author, Craig Canine, has fashioned a page-turning, suspense-filled, dramatic telling of an entrepreneur's struggle, laced with a surprisingly fascinating history of the development of modern agriculture. Not just for business-school types or farmers, it is a tale well-told and absolutely worthy of the high rankings you are seeing here.

Delightful Story of Invention

_Dream_Reaper_ is a delightful tale of two cousins--a mechanic and a salesman in their endeavors to develop a more compact design for the harvesting combine and market the concept through a sponsor. The struggle of Mark Underwood in creating the Bi-Rotor machinery to reduce grain spillage and parts clutter provides a glimpse into the hardships of inventors. The insightful interpersonal skills of Ralph Lagergren reveal a confidence in not settling for corporate comfort, but in taking a big risk for a big payoff. In intervening chapters, Canine diverts from the story to introduce the history of harvesting and its mechanization . The reader learns of many fascinating conversation topics, such as the etymology of "tribulation", a patent infringement lawsuit on a reaper that launched Abraham Lincoln's political career, the corn growing experiments of Henry Wallace, or the genetic differences between grains and weeds enabling an aromatic compound to kill the latter without affecting the former. Whether one is interested in agriculture, machinery, history, Canine's prose makes the book a pure joy to read.............

The best book about product development that I've read.

We take for granted that farmers will get us fed, though less than a century ago, a huge majority of us had to help out at harvest time to make sure. This book is about how advances to the technology of farming were made and are still being made. It is about the harvesting machines, or "combines", and about how these machines were invented. The larger story is about how the odds are stacked against those who dare to advance technology in a meaningful way. We meet modern day renegade heros, who continue to work very hard to overcome the great odds stacked against technology developers. I work as a product developer in "fastening technology" for a major company. Craig Canine's book about the inventors of harvesters teaches more about the process of technology development than any book I've read.

Great history of Ag as well as machinery development problem

I first learned of the book The Dream Reaper, by Craig Canine, from FarmDayta, which carried a series of discussion groups written by Barry Weber of Galesburg, Illinois. He advised all farmers to read the book, telling us it was about the development of the Bi-Rotor combine. I have been asking for this book since first hearing of it sometime in 1995, and found it in paperback at a bookstore just last week. Originally published by Alfred A.Knopf in 1995, the 1997 paperback edition is from The University of Chicago Press. I found this book to be much more than a story of the bi-rotor combine. For purpose of explanation of the importance of this new combine concept, Canine has added the history of the reaper. I learned Cyrus McCormick was not the inventor of the reaper, as I had been taught in the elementary grades. Since combines harvest both corn and small grains, the author describes the crops, and wove into the story the history of the crops to be harvested, including an excellent description of the development of hybrid corn. Mr. Canine exposes the development of the tractors that prepare the soil for seeding those crops, including the competition between manufacturers who sold those machines. The sub-plot of history alone justifies reading this book, as anyone who operates the machinery of agriculture will benefit from an understanding of all the processes involved in the development and marketing of the tools involved in production. As the reader turns the pages of the book, the struggles, breakthroughs, and disappointments of the developers are revealed in a genuine story of real-life imagery. I often felt myself a part of the project, as I recognized several references to publicity that had appeared in farm magazines during the period of development. For a time, the bi-rotor was a Cat combine, but at the last moment they bowed out of the project. I feel this may be as big a blunder for Cat as its earlier decision at the fir st of the century to sell its combine business to John Deere. Many references in @g Online discussion groups have been made by contributors who have found this book, and in each case, the person who had read this book advised everyone investigate what this book might tell each individual. We learn at the end of the book which major agricultural manufacturer finally ends up with the development rights to this new concept combine, and I eagerly await its production in the future. Rumor has it the combine has gone through some radical changes during development under the new patent owners,