The Fascinating Story of Ford Tractors: Henry Ford's Obsession With Feeding America

A Michigan farm in the early eighteen seventies. A boy of eight walks behind his father, who walks behind a horse, who walks behind a plow. The boy is Henry Ford. He hates it. He will later write that his earliest recollection was that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place. He looks at the animal in front of him and decides, even as a child, that there has to be a better way. The horse, he will say years later, is a twelve-hundred-pound hay motor of one horsepower. Around him stretches the agricultural America of the eighteen seventies. Roughly half of all American workers are farmers. The scythe, the threshing flail, the moldboard plow. Three miles an hour, sunup to sundown, every day of the growing season. For thousands of years, the burden of feeding people has been carried by flesh and blood, human and animal, leaning into the same furrow at the same pace. The boy in the field does not yet have words for what he wants. He only knows that the work is wrong, that the labor of feeding America is too heavy for the bodies it falls on, and that no one has lifted it yet. Henry Ford is born on July thirtieth, eighteen sixty-three, on his father's farm in Springwells Township, Wayne County, Michigan. He grows up on the problem.