Vern Schield: Iowa Time Machine August 4, 1993

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On August 4, 1993, Vern L. Schield passed away. Schield moved from tinkering with machinery on family farms to building truck‑mounted cranes and founding Self‑Help International. This Waverly‑based nonprofit continues to work with farmers in the Global South.

In 1930, Vern and his brother Wilbur acquired the machinery of a limestone quarry near Waverly. They began selling crushed lime to farmers, even using their musical talents as “The Limestone Boys” on Waterloo’s WMT radio station to advertise the operation. Through the 1930s, as Wilbur left for work in Indiana, Vern kept the lime business alive and then, helped by improving agricultural conditions under New Deal policies, purchased the quarry in 1936.

In 1942, he assembled a small dragline mounted on a truck, designed to fill lime trucks efficiently, which led to growing demand from other quarry operators and convinced the brothers to build truck‑mounted cranes that they named Bantams. After moving to a new plant in Waverly and incorporating as the Schield Bantam Company in 1946, the firm rode the postwar construction boom, becoming by the mid‑1950s the world’s largest producer of truck‑mounted power cranes and excavators and recording domestic and international sales that topped $10 million in 1956. In 1963, Schield Bantam was acquired by the Koehring Company, merging a Waverly‑grown brand into broader corporate structures in the construction equipment industry.

In 1950, Schield founded Self‑Help, Inc. in Waverly, an organization later incorporated in 1959 as Self‑Help International to alleviate hunger by “helping people help themselves.” Self‑Help reconditioned machinery that no longer fit American economic conditions, but proved useful in poorer rural settings. In the 1960s, Schield designed the Self‑Helper tractor, built from salvage and surplus parts, which Self‑Help shipped to farmers in dozens of countries. Though Self‑Helpers are no longer produced, the nonprofit continues to employ local staff in Ghana and Nicaragua, pairing training with access to resources to support food security, an evolution shaped in part by collaboration with Iowa agronomist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug in 1989. #Iowa #OTD #History #Farming #Innovation