The Rise and Fall of Ford Tractors: Why Ford Walked Away From Farming

The boy who hated farming more than anything in Wayne County, Michigan, spent sixty years building the machine that freed every farmer in America from the thing he could not stand. He sold more tractors than anyone on Earth. He priced them below his own cost to make sure the poorest farmer in the country could afford one. He shook hands with a stranger from Ireland and produced the bestselling tractor in North American history. Then the company that carries his name sold the entire operation to an Italian conglomerate, erased the Ford oval from every tractor on the planet, and walked away from farming forever. The Ford 8N is still a working tractor on small farms across America, 75 years after the last one left the factory. The company that built it has not made a tractor since 1991. This is the story of how that happened, and why the man who hated the farm built the machine that saved it, and the men who inherited his name decided the farmer was no longer worth the trouble. Sources: The Henry Ford Museum. (n.d.). Henry Ford and the Fordson Tractor [Founding narrative, Fordson Model F development, Rouge Plant production, price wars of 1921-1922]. https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/... Nebraska Tractor Test Laboratory. (1920). Test 23: Fordson [Original dynamometer test of the Fordson Model F]. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tracto... Ford Motor Company Archives / The Henry Ford. (n.d.). Ford 9N Tractor, 1939 [Artifact record: Ferguson handshake agreement, three-point hitch, $585 retail price, 99,002 units produced 1939-1942]. https://www.thehenryford.org/collecti... Chicago Tribune. (1991). Ford Sells Tractor Unit to Fiat [Coverage of the 80% sale of Ford New Holland to Fiat S.p.A., 10-year Ford branding agreement, formation of N.H. Geotech]. https://www.chicagotribune.com/1991/0... CNH Industrial. (2025). Our History [Timeline: 1895 New Holland founding, 1917 Fordson, 1939 Ford-Ferguson, 1986 Ford-New Holland, 1991 Fiat acquisition, 1999 CNH Global merger]. https://www.cnh.com/en-us/about-us/ou... Farm Collector. (2008, January). Ford-Ferguson Lawsuit [Harry Ferguson's $340M patent infringement suit, 10,000 pages of testimony, $9.25M settlement in 1952]. https://www.farmcollector.com/tractor... TractorData.com. (n.d.). Ford Farm Tractors Sorted by Year [Complete production timeline: Fordson Model F through Ford-New Holland series, Fiat sale, Ford name phase-out by 1998]. https://www.tractordata.com/farm-trac...