The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

SEASONAL WORK AND CYCLICAL INDUSTRIES
The following material is not particularly important to a thorough under-
standing of Ford’s system, but it was more relevant in an era during which 
farmers might have worked in industry to occupy themselves productively 
in winter. The underlying concept still applies, however, to the potential 
virtues of greenhouse and hydroponic farms: “food factories” that are 
independent of the seasons. The issue of seasonal work for builders is 
meanwhile as applicable today as it was in 1922.
* * *
The idea persists that there exists an essential conflict between industry and 
the farm. There is no such conflict. It is nonsense to say that because the cities 
are overcrowded everybody ought to go back to the farm. If everybody did so 
farming would soon decline as a satisfactory occupation. It is not more sensi-
ble for everyone to flock to the manufacturing towns. If the farms be deserted, 
of what use are manufacturers? A reciprocity can exist between farming and 
manufacturing. The manufacturer can give the farmer what he needs to be a 
good farmer, and the farmer and other producers of raw materials can give 
the manufacturer what he needs to be a good manufacturer. Then with trans-
portation as a messenger, we shall have a stable and a sound system built on 
service. If we live in smaller communities where the tension of living is not 
so high, and where the products of the fields and gardens can be had without 
the interference of so many profiteers, there will be little poverty or unrest.
Look at this whole matter of seasonal work. Take building as an example 
of a seasonal trade. What a waste of power it is to allow builders to hibernate 
through the winter, waiting for the building season to come around! And 
what an equal waste of skill it is to force experienced artisans who have gone 
into factories to escape the loss of the winter season to stay in the factory jobs 
through the building season because they are afraid they may not get their 

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factory places back in the winter. What a waste this all-year system has been! 
If the farmer could get away from the shop to till his farm in the planting, 
growing, and harvesting seasons (they are only a small part of the year, after 
all), and if the builder could get away from the shop to ply his useful trade in 
its season, how much better they would be, and how much more smoothly the 
world would proceed.
Suppose we all moved outdoors every spring and summer and lived the 
wholesome life of the outdoors for three or four months! We could not have 
“slack times.”
The farm has its dull season. That is the time for the farmer to come into 
the factory and help produce the things he needs to till the farm. The factory 
also has its dull season. That is the time for the workmen to go out to the land 
to help produce food. Thus we might take the slack out of work and restore 
the balance between the artificial and the natural.
But not the least benefit would be the more balanced view of life we should 
thus obtain. The mixing of the arts is not only beneficial in a material way, 
but it makes for breadth of mind and fairness of judgment. A great deal of 
our unrest to-day is the result of narrow, prejudiced judgment. If our work 
were more diversified, if we saw more sides of life, if we saw how necessary 
was one factor to another, we should be more balanced. Every man is better 
for a period of work under the open sky.
It is not at all impossible. What is desirable and right is never impossible. It 
would only mean a little teamwork—a little less attention to greedy ambition 
and a little more attention to life.
Those who are rich find it desirable to go away for three or four months 
a year and dawdle in idleness around some fancy winter or summer resort. 
The rank and file of the American people would not waste their time that way 
even if they could. But they would provide the team-work necessary for an 
outdoor, seasonal employment.
It is hardly possible to doubt that much of the unrest we see about us is the 
result of unnatural modes of life. Men who do the same thing continuously the 
year around and are shut away from the health of the sun and the spacious-
ness of the great out of doors are hardly to be blamed if they see matters in a 
distorted light. And that applies equally to the capitalist and the worker.
What is there in life that should hamper normal and wholesome modes of 
living? And what is there in industry incompatible with all the arts receiv-
ing in their turn the attention of those qualified to serve in them? It may be 
objected that if the forces of industry were withdrawn from the shops every 
summer it would impede production. But we must look at the matter from a 
universal point of view. We must consider the increased energy of the indus-
trial forces after three or four months in outdoor work. We must also con-

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Why Be Poor?  •  173
sider the effect on the cost of living which would result from a general return 
to the fields.
We have, as I indicated in a previous chapter, been working toward this 
combination of farm and factory and with entirely satisfactory results. At 
Northville, not far from Detroit, we have a little factory making valves. It is 
a little factory, but it makes a great many valves. Both the management and 
the mechanism of the plant are comparatively simple because it makes but 
one thing. We do not have to search for skilled employees. The skill is in the 
machine. The people of the countryside can work in the plant part of the time 
and on the farm part of the time, for mechanical farming is not very labori-
ous. The plant power is derived from water.
Another plant on a somewhat larger scale is in building at Flat Rock, about 
fifteen miles from Detroit. We have dammed the river. The dam also serves 
as a bridge for the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway, which was in need of a 
new bridge at that point, and a road for the public—all in one construction. 
We are going to make our glass at this point. The damming of the river gives 
sufficient water for the floating to us of most of our raw material. It also gives 
us our power through a hydroelectric plant. And, being well out in the midst 
of the farming country, there can be no possibility of crowding or any of the 
ills incident to too great a concentration of population. The men will have 
plots of ground or farms as well as their jobs in the factory, and these can be 
scattered over fifteen or twenty miles surrounding—for of course nowadays 
the workingman can come to the shop in an automobile. There we shall have 
the combination of agriculture and industrialism and the entire absence of 
all the evils of concentration.
The belief that an industrial country has to concentrate its industries is 
not, in my opinion, well-founded. That is only a stage in industrial develop-
ment. As we learn more about manufacturing and learn to make articles 
with interchangeable parts, then those parts can be made under the best pos-
sible conditions. And these best possible conditions, as far as the employees 
are concerned, are also the best possible conditions from the manufacturing 
standpoint. One could not put a great plant on a little stream. One can put 
a small plant on a little stream, and the combination of little plants, each 
making a single part, will make the whole cheaper than a vast factory would. 
There are exceptions, as where casting has to be done. In such case, as at 
River Rouge, we want to combine the making of the metal and the casting of 
it and also we want to use all of the waste power. This requires a large invest-
ment and a considerable force of men in one place. But such combinations 
are the exception rather than the rule, and there would not be enough of 
them seriously to interfere with the process of breaking down the concentra-
tion of industry.

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