Many of us know Harry Ferguson’s name from early farm tractors. His invention of the hydraulic three-point system and handshake agreement with Henry Ford to put it into production has made the Irish innovator a household name here in America (at least, “household name” in the sort of household I grew up in!).
But before Harry Ferguson made it to this apex of innovation, he had to challenge two prevailing beliefs about tractors and their implements. His need to innovate was spurred on by World War 1, as Germany’s U-Boat campaign blocked ships with needed food from reaching Great Britain. The Irish Board of Agriculture asked Ferguson and an associate to work on improving the efficiency of Ireland’s tractors, giving Ferguson the driving need and the means to kick his innovation into high gear.
After making an extensive survey of Ireland’s agricultural practices, Ferguson determined that the problem wasn’t with the tractors – it was with the implements. He pinpointed the plow in particular as the biggest roadblock in agricultural production. So in order to improve efficiency as quickly as possible, Ferguson decided to attack the implement situation.
Along the way to a better implement system, Ferguson uncovered two central truths about tractors and their attachments. While these truths may seem completely obvious to us today, they represented a major adjustment to the way farmers operated in the early 1900s. Here are the two truths Ferguson uncovered that proved foundational to our modern farming techniques:
- Plows are not one-size-fits-all. In Ferguson’s time, tractor-specific implements were few and far between – many farmers continued to use the same plow their horses had been pulling the year before. This created an incredibly inefficient situation. The plow design that is best for horses isn’t necessarily the best for a tractor, and the size and horsepower of a tractor makes a big difference in its pulling power.
- The tractor and the implement work together as a unit. Plows (and all implements, for that matter) in Ferguson’s time were often simply trailed along behind the tractor like a wagon. Common designs had their own wheels and were very heavy, using the implement’s own weight to break through the earth. Ferguson challenged this presupposition, designing a lightweight plow to match the equally light Eros tractor (a conversion of the Model T Ford). Instead of being passively pulled behind, the plow attached rigidly to the tractor.
Together, these two truths became the backbone of Ferguson’s “unit principle.” He demonstrated his new tractor-and-plow setup in November of 1917. While his early design seems crude to our modern eyes, it was revolutionary in its time. On demonstration day, Ferguson plowed at 2 ½ miles per hour – a rate that was four times of what a team of horses could accomplish.
In the years to come, Ferguson would expand on these early principles and develop the three-point system we use today. Of course, Ferguson wasn’t the only person to ever make these observations – many of his contemporaries were coming to the same conclusions themselves in this time period. But Ferguson, more than anyone else, transformed these observations into workable solutions (the 3-point hitch) that are still in use around the world today.