Henry Ford’s failed attempt at setting up a rubber production facility in Brazil is now well-known thanks to Greg Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fordlandia. Hardly known at all, however, is the English farming experiment he began in 1931.
As historian Kit Kowol explains, Ford tried to apply the “techniques of mass production, scientific management, and high wages” he had made famous in the auto industry to “serve the interests of agriculture and the rural community” in Essex.
In the midst of the Great Depression, this experimental farm was supposed to show how industrial American farming methods could be applied to England. Kowol calls the effort to “harmonize modern technology with traditional patterns of life” an “experiment in conservative modernity.” Ford and his allies in the Conservative Party were attempting to forge their sort of modern rural utopia amidst the global capitalist disaster, when “the English countryside was bursting with schemes to rural regeneration.”
The Ford scheme: stem the rural exodus, preserve traditional rural life, and introduce industrial farming with Ford-produced tractors and trucks. As with today’s megalomaniac billionaires, Ford had plenty of money to spend on his notions. (His anti-Jewish obsessions, for instance, made him Hitler’s favorite American.)
At heart a paternalistic small-town reactionary, Ford believed his workers should combine agricultural and industrial labor. This would lead, he thought, “to greater industrial and political stability. Workers who could grow their own food were less likely to engage in industrial agitation in periods of economic downturn.”
“Though he personally disliked agricultural work,” continues Kowol, the farm-raised Ford nonetheless saw it as a way of “making men more productive, efficient, and proud when they returned to the factory.”
The Ford factory at Dagenham was purposely located on the marshes east of London, away from the corruptions—and the working class tradition and organization—of the city. But the original garden allotments there for his workers proved to be a bust; as in Fordlandia, the land “was totally inappropriate for the task he had set for it.” In addition, it turned out that factory workers didn’t have the “necessary skills nor attitude for farming.” Not to mention the time.
Percival Perry, the Conservative party activist who headed Ford Motors Ltd. in England, suggested Ford test his “pet beliefs” about agricultural mechanization further afield. They settled on a dilapidated estate in Boreham, about thirty miles southwest of London. They named it Fordson Estate, after the Ford’s UK tractor brand. For a while, the press would call that part of Essex “Ford Country.”
More to Explore
The People Who Thought Farmers Without Radios Were Rubes
As it happened, Ford moved on to other crotchets, but Perry continued to rule over the farm.
“Able to manipulate his employer’s will and considerable resources, Perry engineered the farming venture as a means to demonstrate his own Conservative social and political philosophy,” Kowol writes. Perry wanted Fordson to show “how self-consciously enlightened industrialists [like himself] could use mechanization and other modern techniques to create a more productive, vibrant, and harmonious rural society.”
A “family wage” was supposed to maintain traditional family structure, so women weren’t accepted at the Fordson school for agricultural engineering. Workers were paid 25 percent over the county minimum and received a yearly bonus based on the profit made by the estate. The idea was to “remove the injustice of those who did most to increase the land’s value, namely the agricultural worker, receiving the slimmest financial reward.”
Weekly Newsletter
Worker contracts lasted a year, though many were fired before they were vested in the cooperatives. At harvest time, half of the labor force were “casuals,” typically Irish immigrants, who weren’t provided with housing, a situation which riled locals. Borehamites were also upset because they weren’t allowed to glean the farm’s unharvested produce, a traditional practice. So much for rural harmony.
During World War II, when the government guaranteed agricultural prices, Fordson boomed. As an avowed alternative-to-socialism, however, this was particularly ironic. The war also saw a piece of Fordson land turned into a US Army Air Force base. The Women’s Land Army, meanwhile, chucked both Ford’s and Perry’s gendered view of rural life out of the barn.
When Labour ushered in the end of Conservative rule after the end of the war, the Fordson experiment no longer made any sense. Ford died in 1947, marking an end to his funding. Perry and investors ended up buying the operation out. It would eventually be run by “precisely the kind of absentee owners that Perry had once actively sought to exclude.”
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
