I couldn't help but to offer some insights...

James Oliver, the grandfather of what would later become the Oliver Corporation and father of the chilled plow, held 49 U.S. Patents on plow design and/or improvements.  I have always contended that by trying to invent (improve) farming equipment, he basically, 'invented' the company out of business.  You see, James was always concerned about the common, everyday farmer and wanted to make the farmer's very physical job a little easier by making the highest quality product he could make.  With James' improved plowing equipment, and other tillage equipment, and the introduction of scientific genetic farming meant that less farmers were needed to produce the same, or more, agricultural foodstuffs.  So, with James' first patent of the chilled plow set into motion a type of 'deterioration' of the need for hundreds of thousands of family-owned farms.  Thus rises the corporation farm.

Then, fast forward, to the 70s and 80s with White's takeover of the old Oliver Corporation seems to me to have been just a tax-write-off for White.  With the shrinkage of the family farm, the increased competition in the farm equipment manufacturing business, and the total mismanagement by White was a 'perfect storm' of neglect and profiteering.  It didn't take White very long to dispose of factories that weren't performing (because they never updated the manufacturing equipment) which caused James' first factory to close in 1985.

Shame.

My $.02 worth.