Still working,
seventy years on.
Not ornaments. All three mow, tow and mulch their way through the season, same as they always have.
The Ferguson TE20 was built between 1946 and 1956, and more than half a million of them left the factory. In New Zealand it is simply "the little grey Fergie", and there is hardly a farm in the country that did not have one at some point.
Harry Ferguson's real invention was not the tractor but the three-point linkage — the hydraulic hitch that lets an implement float with the ground and transfers its drag onto the rear wheels for grip. Before it, tractors regularly flipped over backwards and killed their drivers. Every tractor built since uses essentially the same idea. It is one of the most quietly important pieces of engineering of the twentieth century.
Ours are TEA20s: three of them, all still earning their keep in the grove.
This tractor has been to the South Pole
Not this exact one. But this model.
When Sir Edmund Hillary joined the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, his job was the unglamorous half: lay fuel and supply depots inland from Scott Base so that Vivian Fuchs's crossing party would have something to arrive at.
Hillary was meant to stop at Depot 700. He did not. With three Ferguson TE20 farm tractors — fitted with tracks, rough canvas cabs, and not much else — he carried on across the polar plateau and reached the South Pole on 4 January 1958.
They were the first party to reach the South Pole overland since Captain Scott's in 1912, and the first ever to get there in motor vehicles. Not in purpose-built polar machines — in petrol farm tractors you could have bought from any dealer in the Wairarapa, driven across the most hostile terrain on earth at a walking pace.
It remains one of the great pieces of New Zealand improvisation: take an ordinary, thoroughly reliable machine, modify it in the shed, and simply keep going.
That is the tractor sitting in our grove. It is why one of our oils is called Galactic Tractor.
Three of them, all different
One restored, one somewhere in between, and one wearing every one of its seventy years on the outside.
The tidy one
Restored, and the one that does most of the mulching. Here with a flail mower on the three-point linkage — precisely the job Harry Ferguson designed the system for.
The red one
Repainted at some point in a previous life, and none the worse for it. Mostly used for towing and general carting about the grove.
The honest one
Untouched, unrestored, and much the most photogenic of the three. Every layer of paint it has ever worn is visible somewhere on it. Starts first time.
Because they are genuinely useful
A seventy-year-old Fergie is light enough not to compact wet ground, narrow enough to fit between olive rows, simple enough to fix with ordinary spanners, and cheap enough that a scratch does not matter. For a grove this size it is hard to do better with anything modern.
They are also, without any question, the single most popular thing on the property with visiting children.
Stay in the grove →Fergies, photographed
Galactic Tractor
The Fergie has its own label — the same oil as the others, with a small grey tractor on the front and a very large story behind it.