Machinery Matters

In this month’s issue Jane Brooks looks at the venerable Ferguson tractor, still a popular tool on many smallholdings, but beware it takes a little getting used to.

- Jane Brooks

If there’s one model of tractor that’s written most about, makes people smile when they see it and is surprisingly common, it’s Harry Ferguson’s TE20.  Fondly known across the world as the ‘Little Grey Fergie’ there were well over 500,000 made at Banner Lane in Coventry between 1946 and 1956. Their old technology makes them relatively easy to fix, thousands of them are still working and reasonably priced parts are readily available.

The first TE20s came off the production line in October 1946, a light manoeuvrable tractor with a combination of three-point linkage and hydraulics, the revolutionary ‘Ferguson System’ which enabled the tractor and implement to work as one with implements working as part of the tractor not as dead weights towed behind. A hydraulic pump operated by a lever at the side of the driver enabled an implement such as a plough to raise or lower the tool to alter the depth of the plough in the soil.

Ferguson TE20s are fitted with a 9-inch single-plate clutch, there’s no live drive to the PTO or hydraulics, this means that everything stops when the clutch pedal is depressed. If you are more used to driving a more modern tractor it’s a different way of driving and operating implements and takes practice, just as it would have when Harry Ferguson opened his training school back in the late 1940’s.

THE FERGUSON SYSTEM