Bloody Sunday Russia

AGWEEK EXCLUSIVE: A career on the grow

MOSCOW - Watch as Howard Dahl read the signs in the public notices and signs in the center of Moscow, I am amazed at how he was able to read the signs that led to the success of his business and so many Dakota North.

I first met Howard in the mid-1980s, when his father, Gene Dahl, introduced us. I had known through the genes years as chairman of the board of Steiger Tractor Co. - signed a North Dakota / Minnesota company. Gene was the son-in-law of EG Melroe, who started a company that later developed the Bobcat brand, another company to sign for the state.

Back then, Gene asked if I'd be interested in talking to Howard about a story for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead about Howard's Concord air seeders  Howard and his brother, Brian, had been building his business for several years by then, bringing pneumatic seeders and minimum-till technology to the Upper Great Plains.

Gene smiled a lot at this interview, but I remember Howard was distracted.

"The late 1980s were a very difficult time for anyone building farm machinery," Howard recalls, years later.

Howard had grown up in Gwinner, N.D., home of Bobcat. He'd gone to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, then on to work for Campus Crusade for Christ in southern universities. He met his wife, Ann, in 1972 and went on to graduate school at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he earned a master's in the philosophy of religion. He loved the academics, but was pulled back to his heritage in Fargo, N.D.

He'd spent time in Hungary on behalf of his father's company in 1974 as Steiger began to use axles made in that country. He found himself interested in the lives of people who had lived under the atheist mandate of the state.

In 1977, he and younger brother Brian, also a UND grad, joined him in founding Concord Inc.

Dahl doesn't answer simply when asked whether it was an easy decision to return home to take up a manufacturing legacy that was two generations old in agricultural manufacturing giants. Brian says a relative advised him to go into business with his brother.

Choosing to come home was a matter of discerning God's will, through "many counselors," and then "letting the peace of Christ rule in your heart," he says.

Brian says Howard always has focused on the "what" to do, and Brian has focused on "how," or the process.

Bloody Sunday, 1905 « Iconic Photos

The 20th Century opened with Russia slowly teetering towards disenchantment and chaos. Emancipation of serfs in 1861 left many landowners at a loss — unable or unwilling to implement better administration and more efficient farming methods, they rapidly ran up crippling debts. Directly or indirectly, this led to series of poor harvests and a widespread famine in 1891, which revealed the inadequacies of the Tsarist government. Demonstrations, strikes and general unrest were slowly gathering momentum as Russia commenced a long anticipated war on Japan in 1905.

The war was initially viewed as an opportunity to improve Russia’s domestic situation, but its navy suffered humiliating defeats in the Far East. The Interior Minister Vyacheslav Plehve, who predicted that the impeding war with Japan will be a ‘victorious little war’ was assassinated. In January 1905, as military disaster unfolded, dissatisfaction erupted into revolution in St Petersburg. The immediate spark was the dubious dismissal of three workers, and the leader of the demonstration was the factory chaplain named Father Georgi Gapon. Gapon was himself no revolutionary, though he was subsequently represented as one. He wrote, “I went to the Tsar in the simple-hearted belief that we would receive pravda .”