They will marvel at the hi-tech tractors, look with awe at the combine harvesters and enjoy sitting on the driving seats,
Some will ask questions about satellite guidance systems. Others will collect colourful brochures for study at home.
It will all reflect the infectious fascination that farmers, contractors and others have with agricultural machinery.
All that interest was boosted in Ireland a long time ago by a farmer’s son from Co Down who had similar interests as a young man.
But, unlike others, he went on to revolutionise agriculture with a tractor that replaced the horse on the land and became known as ‘The Little Grey Fergie’.
It was light but sturdy, was suitable for work on all types of land, and was designed in a way that farmers could easily attach, raise, lower, and detach implements such as ploughs.
Harry Ferguson was an inventive genius who had a small garage in Belfast. He developed a racing motorcycle which he rode himself.
He constructed an aeroplane from plans in a magazine and made one of the first air flights in Ireland over a distance of 130 yards near Hillsborough in 1909.
Harry moved into the development of agricultural machinery with which his name is still associated.
He improved the speed and efficiency of tilling the land by mounting a plough on a tractor and came to Dublin in 1930 to demonstrate his invention.
O’Brien’s field, out in Foxrock, was where he explained the principle behind his Ferguson two furrow plough.
It was attached to a paraffin oil-fuelled Fordson tractor, made in Cork, which he drove.
Tractors were slowly beginning to appear on Irish farms, but there were only 2,000 of them in use by 1939.
That was also the year Henry Ford, whose people came from Ballinascarthy in West Cork, took on his first and only partner — Harry Ferguson — in a deal sealed with a handshake.
Harry Ferguson demonstrated the new Ford-Ferguson tractor at Chantilly Stud Farm in Shankill, Co Dublin, in 1940, and predicted it would make farming prosperous by reducing production costs.
The Ferguson-Ford partnership produced 350,000 tractors in seven years, but after Ford’s death there was a parting of the ways.
Ferguson claimed infringement in the patent of the tractor and the Ford Company made a IR£3.3m settlement.
He set up his own tractor-making factory in Detroit and began to collaborate with Standard Motor Company, which produced the ‘Little Grey Fergie” at its Coventry factory in England.
The plant had a capacity of producing 500 tractors a day.
Designed to sell at IR£343, the Ferguson tractor could do in a day what a man with a pair of horses would take a week to accomplish.
Little wonder tractor numbers in Ireland rose from 3,333 at the end of the Second World War to 9,178 in 1948.
A year later, Harry Ferguson was on his favourite subject when he was conferred with an honorary degree by Trinity College, Dublin.
He said 96% of our farms were still being operated on the same type of power that was used in Egypt 1,000 years before.
There were 350,000 horses on farms. Allowing four acres to feed a horse meant that 1.5m acres were being devoted to feed animals to cultivate the land.
Mechanising half of Irish farms would require around 150,000 tractors which, with their implements, would cost about IR£75m.
But the plus side was that utilising the machinery could increase the annual income of Irish farmers by IR£63m.
A total of 517,651 ‘Little Grey Fergies’ (including variants) had been built by the time the last one rolled off the Coventry production line in 1956.
Ferguson and Massey Harris came together in 1953 to form Massey Ferguson, but Harry resigned a year later as chairman and director to concentrate on inventions outside agriculture.
A promoter of motorcycle and car racing all his life, he designed the Ferguson P99, the only four-wheel drive Formula 1 car ever to win a Grand Prix, driven by Stirling Moss.
The inventor died in 1960, but his legacy lives on and will be recalled at the ploughing championships.
Six teams from Cavan, Cork, Donegal, and Galway will build a Ferguson 20 tractor from the start and against the clock.
Harry Ferguson’s philosophy could even be a mission statement of the National Ploughing Association.
Speaking in 1939, he said: “The land! That is where our roots are. There is the basis of our physical life. The further we get from the land, the greater our insecurity. From the land comes everything that supports life.”
source: irishexaminer
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