Letter: Honouring the legacy of NI’s greatest inventor - the brilliant Harry Ferguson, who revolutionised agriculture and saved countless millions from poverty and hunger

Coming from a farming background he saw first hand the poverty and back-breaking work of subsistence farming and realised there must be a better way to farm whereby the tractor was king and not the horse.

His first plough, the Ferguson Belfast Plough in 1917, was directly attached to a tractor by a single link; this was quickly followed by the Ferguson Belfast Duplex Hitch Plough (using two links) in December 1919. With both these innovations, he was already making world history.

On February 12, 1925 at Belfast he filed his Ferguson Master Patent.

Titled “Apparatus for Coupling Agricultural Implements to Tractors and Automatically Regulating the Depth of Work”, the patent was such an important invention in the development of the tractor and has, as intended by Harry Ferguson, revolutionised agriculture.

Harry Ferguson outlined in great detail how interchangeable implements could be quickly linked to tractors and the very important principle of draft control.

Draft control is the automatic depth of a soil-engaging implement controlled by the force or draft required to pull it – and it meant that implements no longer needed a wheel to set the working depth. Implements could be raised or lowered into working position, and controlled by just the touch of a finger. This was the brilliance of Harry Ferguson’s innovative new way to farm.

In the patent, he formulated how it could be done using mechanical, electric, or hydraulics, but it would not be until he built the Ferguson Belfast Black Prototype tractor of 1933 (with converging three-point hydraulic linkage) that his vision of 1925 would become a practical reality and the Ferguson Principle became the Ferguson System of farm mechanisation and modernisation.

Few patents over the years have been as influential as the Ferguson Master Patent of 1925.

Innovators of today, designing implements and tractors that are computer controlled, still quote the Ferguson Master Patent in reference to their own designs – hence the Ferguson Master Patent remains so important.

The Ferguson Master Patent on its own makes the case why Harry Ferguson is now recognised as the father of the modern tractor – the ideas contained within it are just so revolutionary.

Those of us from Northern Ireland can take great pride in the patent and for being from the same country as the inventor who gifted the modern tractor to the world, reducing hunger, poverty and saving countless millions of lives over the years.

It also puts an onus on us to promote Harry Ferguson’s legacy and to pay fitting honour to a world-changing invention.

As part of the centenary celebrations of the Ferguson Master Patent in 2025, the founding of a new Harry Ferguson Museum of Innovation in Northern Ireland this year would be a wonderful way to deliver on this while at the same time marking the historic occasion.

Stevan Patterson, Castlederg