Massey Ferguson

The history of Massey Ferguson

Massey Ferguson is two companies and one argument about hydraulics.

The older half goes back to 1847, when Daniel Massey founded the Massey Manufacturing Company at Newcastle in Ontario. In 1891 it merged with A. Harris and Son Implement, Alanson Harris's firm, to become Massey-Harris. For its first decades in tractors the company owned no tractor factory at all: the machines were built to contract by other engineering firms around the Great Lakes, and Massey-Harris sold them.

The other half is one engineer. Before the Second World War Harry Ferguson worked out how to hang an implement on three points and let hydraulics control the draught — the arrangement nearly every tractor has used since. An attempt to put it on David Brown tractors came to nothing. A handshake with Henry Ford did not: from 1939 the system went into the Fordson line, the Ford 9N among them. When Ferguson fell out with Henry Ford II he left and sold his own light, manoeuvrable tractors through Ferguson Ltd from 1946, with considerable success in post-war Germany and beyond.

The two halves joined in 1953 as Massey-Harris-Ferguson, shortened to Massey Ferguson in 1958.

Through the 1950s the range had a hole in it between roughly 50 and 60 hp, filled for a time by rebadging other makers' machines — Minneapolis-Moline among them. To end that dependence the company began a programme called Detroit Xperimental in the early 1960s: one modular tractor platform for every market, into which about a million engineering hours went between 1960 and 1964. It produced the 100 series, the “Red Giants” — the 130, 135, 165 and 175. The MF 135, built from late 1964, became one of the most-produced tractors ever made.

Ownership moved repeatedly afterwards. Massey Ferguson bought the Italian maker Landini outright in 1959, and from the early 1970s Landini built tractors that were the same machine in different paint; the majority stake went to ARGO in 1994. Between about 1970 and 1982 the company held a stake in Eicher in Germany, after ZF decided to stop making gearboxes for Eicher's ranges — Eicher needed capital and a driveline, Massey Ferguson wanted models for its central European dealers. In 1994 the whole group was bought by AGCO.

The Indian connection is the longest-running of them. TAFE has built Massey Ferguson tractors under licence since 1960, and in April 2024 that relationship broke down in public after AGCO moved to end the licence and supply agreements. It was settled by dividing the name itself: TAFE is now the exclusive and permanent owner of the Massey Ferguson brand in India, Nepal and Bhutan, with no licence left to renew, and AGCO holds the brand everywhere else. AGCO sold its remaining 20.7% of TAFE to the Amalgamations Group for $260m; TAFE stays a long-term investor in AGCO at up to 16.3% but gave up its board seat, and the operating agreements between them were wound up by agreement, with existing obligations for parts and components run off in an orderly way.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: Massey Ferguson, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.