2025 is a very special year in the history of the farm tractor as it marks the centenary of the Ferguson Master Patent that Harry Ferguson (1884-1960) first filed at Belfast, Northern Ireland on the 12^th February, 1925. 

The Patent number 253,566 titled “Apparatus for Coupling Agricultural Implements to Tractors and Automatically Regulating the Depth of Work” is today known simply as the Ferguson Master Patent. It contains so many important inventions and compellingly makes the case of why Harry Ferguson is rightly recognised as the father of the modern tractor. 

These important inventions revolutionised the tractor in general and did as intended by Harry Ferguson become a pivotal event in agriculture.  The final version of the Ferguson Master Patent was deliberately filed by Harry Ferguson on the 11^th November, 1925 (Armistice Day) in his great belief that in bettering people’s lives by reducing hunger and poverty in modernising agriculture it would help end conflicts and wars.  Now that was a vision for humanity. 

For the first time in history Harry Ferguson envisioned the tractor as a mechanised farming solution with quickly interchangeable implements that were directly attached to the tractor with automatic depth control, weight transfer, safety and ease of use.  The tractor having quickly changeable implements for different tasks is taken for granted now, yet a century ago Harry Ferguson was the first person in history to think of this and that goes to the simple brilliance of the man.

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 from 1931 to 1933 with converging three point hydraulic linkage that his vision of 1925 would become a practical reality in the Ferguson System that was finally perfected by the autumn of 1935 in the Fields of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.  The completion of the Ferguson System ninety years ago made the world’s first production tractor the Ferguson-Brown Type A of 1936 possible.

Few Patents over the years has been as influential as the Ferguson Master Patent of 1925.  A century after Harry Ferguson first envisaged these ground-breaking ideas innovators of today designing implements and tractors that are now computer controlled still quote the Ferguson Master Patent in reference to their own Patents and designs.  The Ferguson Master Patent still remains that important and is so worthy of celebration in 2025.

Stevan Patterson, Castlederg, County Tyrone.