Henry George Ferguson was rarely accused of lacking ambition, for there was within him a desire to succeed, not in financial wealth per se, but to convert those around him to his way of thinking, whether it be his immediate staff or the farmers of Ireland.
Yet that wasn’t enough for the entrepreneur, in his later career he wanted to encompass the whole world in his craving for doing things the Ferguson way and so be boldly developed an idea to cure the ills of this planet in one fell swoop, and naturally it held the Ferguson system at its very heart.
He would always suggest that he had been nurturing the idea for many years, but he first let it loose upon a global audience at Hot Springs, Virginia in 1943, as the war raged on in Europe and Asia with all sides making the maximum effort to prevail.
Produce as nutrition
Yet that was the point of the conference – to start planning for a peace that many felt confident would be dominated by the allied powers now that America was fully committed to winning the conflict.
Ferguson was hugely enthusiastic about the idea of a disciplined approach to peace which would bring an end to hunger and poverty, and prepared not just a series of tractor demonstrations, but also a lengthy speech in which he set out his vision for the future.
The basic complaint of his, was that the civilised nations had developed economies that were always fighting inflation with increased wages that translated into increased costs bringing another round of demands for more money and so on.
Ferguson presents his plan
In a bid to overturn this centuries old system, he proposed a price reduction plan that would not only quash the evil snake of inflation, but also usher in the appreciation of farming as a consistent source of nutrition for the world’s population, rather than a hit and miss affair of local feast and famine.
It must be remembered that most of the world at the time had risen little above subsistence farming with draught animals still the dominate source of power on the land by far.
It was by replacing these animals with tractors that the world would progress though a steep fall in food prices brought about by mechanisation, and he brought into the equation the notion of using oil as an power source.
It was a strong selling point of both Ford and Ferguson that keeping a horse tied up land that could be used for production, fast forward 90 years and we see land being returned to energy capture even as the world’s population exceeds eight billion.
Machinery for the task
Naturally there would need to be a supply of excellent machinery and he just happened to have a source in mind, thus elevating the development of his ploughing geometry to a world changing tool that would be the saviour of mankind.
Indeed, he appeared to go further and claim that his ambition all along had been to alleviate world hunger and poverty though his invention, which may well have been true but such intractable problems are not easily fixed however much attention an individual genius might apply to them.
He had also gained a friend an ally in the form of Henry Ford, who shared the strong belief that tractors were to drag the greater part of mankind out of the perennial drudgery of subsistence farming, yet that partnership was to meet an inglorious end, putting paid to any further notions of the Ferguson company dominating farming in America.
This then, was the bones of his Price Reduction Plan, and in hindsight it is all so wonderfully innocent and naïve, but this was hardly his fault for he was brought up during the latter stages of the British Empire when other countries generally did as they were told by the mother nation.
Unfortunately, that was no longer the case even in 1943, and at the end of the war it had became quite clear who the new boss was, and it was country which had a manufacturing capacity that dwarfed the countries of Europe which, if they still had an industrial base at all, was tired and worn out by the conflict.
Ferguson ignores funding
Quite how Ferguson intended that the equipping of the world’s farms with his tractor design was to be paid for was not made clear in the speech, yet he did make reference to William Beveridge, who had proposed a new National Insurance scheme to ensure that the British should no longer endure poverty in their own country.
It could well be that he saw the adoption of the Ferguson system as an extension of this benevolence, but that is only a speculation rather than fact.
There were many flaws in Ferguson’s price reduction plan, he major one being that the world moves on and mechanisation would free up up labour that would move to the cities to make consumer goods – it was not going to stay on the home farm kicking its heels while the eldest son did the farming.
Soldiers returning from the front lines would have seen the huge benefits of machines in the worlds first fully-mechanised war, the planes and tanks would have had engines measured in hundreds of horsepower, the little Fergie would soon be out of its league as the race for power accelerated.
Bigger is beautiful
Ferguson had resisted attempts to build a bigger tractor before the war, leading to the split with David Brown, likewise, Henry Ford had long before argued that the Model T was the ultimate car and newer models were not needed.
In both cases, they had been proven wrong, for they had both seen their inventions as solving one single problem and having done so the world would carry on much as before but with that problem solved.
Mankind is far too restless to ever be content, invention has always come through enquiry and experimentation, and the instinct to create a better life would soon overwhelm these advances, leaving them as milestones in human achievement that are rightly celebrated, but are only a start in a new thread of enterprise, not the end.
