My Life and Work
practically dropped work upon a tractor until the automobile was in
production. With the automobile on the farms, the tractor became a
necessity. For then the farmers had been introduced to power.
The farmer does not stand so much in need of new tools as of power to
run the tools that he has. I have followed many a weary mile behind a
plough and I know all the drudgery of it. What a waste it is for a human
being to spend hours and days behind a slowly moving team of horses when
in the same time a tractor could do six times as much work! It is no
wonder that, doing everything slowly and by hand, the average farmer has
not been able to earn more than a bare living while farm products are
never as plentiful and cheap as they ought to be.
As in the automobile, we wanted power--not weight. The weight idea was
firmly fixed in the minds of tractor makers. It was thought that excess
weight meant excess pulling power--that the machine could not grip
unless it were heavy. And this in spite of the fact that a cat has not
much weight and is a pretty good climber. I have already set out my
ideas on weight. The only kind of tractor that I thought worth working
on was one that would be light, strong, and so simple that any one could
run it. Also it had to be so cheap that any one could buy it. With these
ends in view, we worked for nearly fifteen years on a design and spent
some millions of dollars in experiments. We followed exactly the same
course as with the automobile. Each part had to be as strong as it was
possible to make it, the parts had to be few in number, and the whole
had to admit of quantity production. We had some thought that perhaps
the automobile engine might be used and we conducted a few experiments
with it. But finally we became convinced that the kind of tractor we
wanted and the automobile had practically nothing in common. It was the
intention from the beginning that the tractor should be made as a
separate undertaking from the automobile and in a distinct plant. No
plant is big enough to make two articles.
The automobile is designed to carry; the tractor is designed to pull--to
climb. And that difference in function made all the difference in the
world in construction. The hard problem was to get bearings that would
stand up against the heavy pull. We finally got them and a construction
which seems to give the best average performance under all conditions.
We fixed upon a four-cylinder engine that is started by gasoline but
runs thereafter on kerosene. The lightest weight that we could attain
with strength was 2,425 pounds. The grip is in the lugs on the driving
wheels--as in the claws of the cat.
In addition to its strictly pulling functions, the tractor, to be of the
greatest service, had also to be designed for work as a stationary
engine so that when it was not out on the road or in the fields it might
be hitched up with a belt to run machinery. In short, it had to be a
compact, versatile power plant. And that it has been. It has not only
ploughed, harrowed, cultivated, and reaped, but it has also threshed,
run grist mills, saw mills, and various other sorts of mills, pulled
stumps, ploughed snow, and done about everything that a plant of
moderate power could do from sheep-shearing to printing a newspaper. It
has been fitted with heavy tires to haul on roads, with sledge runners
for the woods and ice, and with rimmed wheels to run on rails. When the
shops in Detroit were shut down by coal shortage, we got out the
_Dearborn Independent_ by sending a tractor to the electro-typing
factory--stationing the tractor in the alley, sending up a belt four
stories, and making the plates by tractor power. Its use in ninety-five
distinct lines of service has been called to our attention, and probably
we know only a fraction of the uses.
The mechanism of the tractor is even more simple than that of the
automobile and it is manufactured in exactly the same fashion. Until the
present year, the production has been held back by the lack of a
suitable factory. The first tractors had been made in the plant at
Dearborn which is now used as an experimental station. That was not
large enough to affect the economies of large-scale production and it
could not well be enlarged because the design was to make the tractors
at the River Rouge plant, and that, until this year, was not in full
operation.
Now that plant is completed for the making of tractors. The work flows
exactly as with the automobiles. Each part is a separate departmental
undertaking and each part as it is finished joins the conveyor system
which leads it to its proper initial assembly and eventually into the
final assembly. Everything moves and there is no skilled work. The
capacity of the present plant is one million tractors a year. That is
the number we expect to make--for the world needs inexpensive,
general-utility power plants more now than ever before--and also it now
knows enough about machinery to want such plants.
The first tractors, as I have said, went to England. They were first
offered in the United States in 1918 at $750. In the next year, with the
higher costs, the price had to be made $885; in the middle of the year
it was possible again to make the introductory price of $750. In 1920 we
charged $790; in the next year we were sufficiently familiar with the
production to begin cutting. The price came down to $625 and then in
1922 with the River Rouge plant functioning we were able to cut to $395.
All of which shows what getting into scientific production will do to a
price. Just as I have no idea how cheaply the Ford automobile can
eventually be made, I have no idea how cheaply the tractor can
eventually be made.
It is important that it shall be cheap. Otherwise power will not go to
all the farms. And they must all of them have power. Within a few years
a farm depending solely on horse and hand power will be as much of a
curiosity as a factory run by a treadmill. The farmer must either take
up power or go out of business. The cost figures make this inevitable.
During the war the Government made a test of a Fordson tractor to see
how its costs compared with doing the work with horses. The figures on
the tractor were taken at the high price plus freight. The depreciation
and repair items are not so great as the report sets them forth, and
even if they were, the prices are cut in halves which would therefore
cut the depreciation and repair charge in halves. These are the figures:
COST, FORDSON, $880. WEARING LIFE, 4,800 HOURS AT 4/5 ACRES PER HOUR,
3,840 ACRES
3,840 acres at $880; depreciation per acre .221
Repairs for 3,840 acres, $100; per acre .026
Fuel cost, kerosene at 19 cents; 2 gal. per acre .38
1 gal. oil per 8 acres; per acre .075
Driver, $2 per day, 8 acres; per acre .25
---
Cost of ploughing with Fordson; per acre. .95
8 HORSES COST, $1,200. WORKING LIFE, 5,000 HOURS AT 4/5 ACRE PER HOUR,
4,000 ACRES
4,000 acres at $1,200, depreciation of horses, per acre. . . . 30
Feed per horse, 40 cents (100 working days) per acre . . . . . 40
Feed per horse, 10 cents a day (265 idle days) per acre. . . 2.65
Two drivers, two gang ploughs, at $2 each per day, per acre. . 50
----
Cost of ploughing with horses; per acre. . . . . . . . . . . 1.46
At present costs, an acre would run about 40 cents only two cents
representing depreciation and repairs. But this does not take account of
the time element. The ploughing is done in about one fourth the time,
with only the physical energy used to steer the tractor. Ploughing has
become a matter of motoring across a field.
Farming in the old style is rapidly fading into a picturesque memory.
This does not mean that work is going to remove from the farm. Work
cannot be removed from any life that is productive. But power-farming
does mean this--drudgery is going to be removed from the farm.
Power-farming is simply taking the burden from flesh and blood and
putting it on steel. We are in the opening years of power-farming. The
motor car wrought a revolution in modern farm life, not because it was a
vehicle, but because it had power. Farming ought to be something more
than a rural occupation. It ought to be the business of raising food.
And when it does become a business the actual work of farming the
average sort of farm can be done in twenty-four days a year. The other
days can be given over to other kinds of business. Farming is too
seasonal an occupation to engage all of a man's time.
As a food business, farming will justify itself as a business if it
raises food in sufficient quantity and distributes it under such
conditions as will enable every family to have enough food for its
reasonable needs. There could not be a food trust if we were to raise
such overwhelming quantities of all kinds of food as to make
manipulation and exploitation impossible. The farmer who limits his
planting plays into the hands of the speculators.
And then, perhaps, we shall witness a revival of the small flour-milling
business. It was an evil day when the village flour mill disappeared.
Cooperative farming will become so developed that we shall see
associations of farmers with their own packing houses in which their own
hogs will be turned into ham and bacon, and with their own flour mills
in which their grain will be turned into commercial foodstuffs.
Why a steer raised in Texas should be brought to Chicago and then served
in Boston is a question that cannot be answered as long as all the
steers the city needs could be raised near Boston. The centralization of
food manufacturing industries, entailing enormous costs for
transportation and organization, is too wasteful long to continue in a
developed community.
We shall have as great a development in farming during the next twenty
years as we have had in manufacturing during the last twenty.
CHAPTER XV
WHY CHARITY?
Why should there by any necessity for almsgiving in a civilized
community? It is not the charitable mind to which I object. Heaven
forbid that we should ever grow cold toward a fellow creature in need.
Human sympathy is too fine for the cool, calculating attitude to take
its place. One can name very few great advances that did not have human
sympathy behind them. It is in order to help people that every notable
service is undertaken.
The trouble is that we have been using this great, fine motive force for
ends too small. If human sympathy prompts us to feed the hungry, why
should it not give the larger desire--to make hunger in our midst
impossible? If we have sympathy enough for people to help them out of
their troubles, surely we ought to have sympathy enough to keep them
out.
It is easy to give; it is harder to make giving unnecessary. To make the
giving unnecessary we must look beyond the individual to the cause of
his misery--not hesitating, of course, to relieve him in the meantime,
but not stopping with mere temporary relief. The difficulty seems to be
in getting to look beyond to the causes. More people can be moved to
help a poor family than can be moved to give their minds toward the
removal of poverty altogether.
I have no patience with professional charity, or with any sort of
commercialized humanitarianism. The moment human helpfulness is
systematized, organized, commercialized, and professionalized, the heart
of it is extinguished, and it becomes a cold and clammy thing.
Real human helpfulness is never card-catalogued or advertised. There are
more orphan children being cared for in the private homes of people who