NONFICTION - Sept. 10, 1995

DREAM REAPER: A Story of Modern Agriculture by Craig Canine (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 288 pp.). “Ain’t that a hell of a way to get something done,” says Mark Underwood, farmer and inventor, in the middle of “Dream Reaper”: “Go to the junkyard for inspiration.” It isn’t the typical road, these days, to technological breakthrough, but it worked for Underwood, whose pragmatic, grass-roots, seat-of-the-pants approach to machine design led him to create--if Craig Canine is any judge--an apparently revolutionary crop combine. The key word in the previous sentence is apparently, for the Bi-Rotor Combine remains a dream reaper, destined quite possibly to be an unproduced, one-of-a-kind machine not because of any engineering deficiency but for lack of corporate interest. First-time book author Canine, a farm boy himself, is certainly a believer; this book is a loving account of the Bi-Rotor’s development, a product of Underwood’s countless hours in the shop and the unflagging enthusiasm of his cousin Ralph Lagergren, a salesman who shook countless money trees in search of financial backing. Canine’s telling of the Bi-Rotor story is much more interesting than you’d initially suspect, in large part because it touches on the history of farm machines in the United States, which is to say on industrial giants like Henry Ford and Cyrus McCormick as well as forgotten innovators like Hiram Moore and James Patterson. The latter pair’s combines were economic failures despite their field successes--James Fenimore Cooper called Moore’s 1840s machine “a gigantic invention” for its ability to cut, thresh, clean and bag wheat, while Patterson’s truly gigantic combine (its wheels were 18 feet in diameter) proved itself in California’s Central Valley farms in the 1850s--and it seems likely that Underwood and Lagergren are following in their footsteps. The reader still roots for these little guys, of course, in their attempts to convince monoliths such as Deere, Case and Caterpillar that their strange-looking, convention-defying combine is a machine worthy of production. And who knows? This book may put them over the top.