Vermeer Corporation

Somewhere right now, a Vermeer is running

It is a Tuesday. In a Nebraska field a baler spins loose hay into a tidy round drum. Under a city street, a directional drill threads fiber past a century-old water main. In a yard outside Phoenix, a horizontal grinder eats a pile of storm-felled trees and spits out mulch.

None of these operators know each other. None will think about the company whose name is stamped on the machine. That is exactly the point. Vermeer builds equipment for work that only gets noticed when it stops - the digging, drilling, baling and grinding that quietly assembles modern life. The company has spent three quarters of a century getting very good at being taken for granted.

The headquarters sits in Pella, Iowa - population smaller than the number of people who use Vermeer gear on any given morning. It is privately held, run by the third generation of the founding family, and shows no interest in changing either of those facts. In an economy that prizes the loud and the disruptive, Vermeer's edge is stubborn consistency.

It started because unloading grain was annoying

In 1943, a central-Iowa farmer named Gary Vermeer got tired of shoveling grain out of his wagon by hand. So he built a mechanical hoist to tip the wagon and let gravity do the work. Neighbors wanted one. By 1948 he and a cousin were manufacturing the hoist out of a 2,500-square-foot shop on the west side of Pella. That shop was the whole company.

Gary Vermeer was a tinkerer with a habit of noticing hard chores and refusing to accept them. In the 1960s his crew built a machine that could dig up, move and replant a full-grown tree. In 1971 came the invention that reshaped agriculture: the first commercially successful large round hay baler. Those tidy round bales you see dotting every rural highway? That silhouette is his.

What a Vermeer actually does for you

Six product families, one common denominator: work most people would rather not do by hand.

Run by a family that keeps score in decades

The current CEO, Jason Andringa, took the top job in 2015. Before Pella, he worked at NASA - which tells you something about how the family thinks about engineering. He is the third generation to lead, and he leads a company with more than 70 family shareholders who deliberately stay private and stay patient.

Vermeer runs on a "4P" philosophy - principles, people, product, profit, in that order - rooted in the founding family's faith and a refusal to optimize for the next quarter at the expense of the next generation. It is an unfashionable way to run a manufacturer. It also happens to have worked for 75 years.

Five things worth knowing