During the 1800s farmers took everything from a simple hoe to a thresher "snorting black smoke" into Iowa fields in pursuit of better harvests. Machines were run by hand, by oxen or horses, and finally by steam engines. Farm machinery grew up with the state, whose farmers were always eager for anything that helped them get more work done.
The 19th century witnessed a revolution in farming technology. Just as machines were coming into factories in the city, new machinery was changing the way farmers planted and harvested their crops. In some cases, farming at the start of the 19th century was not much different from how had it been done thousands of years ago. Within the lifetime of many Iowa farm residents, the world seemed to be changing with incredible speed.
For more than 100 years, American farm tools were made by local blacksmiths. An important tool to early farmers was the plow. The farmers used the plow to loosen the soil, allow moisture to reach the roots of crops and to keep down the weeds. Plows were made of wood, held together with metal bolts and bars. Some blacksmiths experimented with changes to make their plows turn better furrows (a furrow is the shallow trench of turned soil left behind the plow). In the 1800s cast iron parts were added to the cutting edge.
Prairie soil stuck to the wooden or iron plows. Plowing took a yoke (pair) of oxen and three workers: one to drive the team, one to steer the plow, and the third to clean dirt off (scour) the blade. It was possible for one person to do all three jobs in turn, but make for very slow work!
John Deere's plow solved the problem of soil sticking. It also pulled more easily than any plow that had been tried before. It allowed farmers to switch from slow oxen to faster teams of horses for plowing power.
New technologies allowed farmers to work faster and more efficiently. The colter, a sharp wheel-shaped piece on plows, cut into the surface of the ground to help the plow blade move through the soil more easily. Even so, a farmer walking behind a plow could only plow two acres a day. A plow pulled by two horses with a seat where the farmer could ride was called a sulky plow. With a two-horse sulky that could plow two rows at a rime, a farmer could plow up to seven acres a day.
Corn was first planted by hand, like other grains. After the corn began to grow, it needed cultivation (stirring the soil to kill the weeds). Because straight rows made cultivation easier, farmers marked out their field rows before planting. They drew lines across the field lengthwise and crosswise, making a checkerboard pattern. Corn seed was planted where the lines crossed. The field could then be cultivated either crosswise or lengthwise.
Corn seed was placed in the box of the hand corn planter. The tip of the planter was pushed into the ground. The handles were opened and closed, dropping a few seeds into the ground.
Some horse-drawn planters were operated by two workers—one who drove the horses and an extra helper who pulled the seed planting handle as the machine came to each cross. A paddle behind the seed planter pushed dirt over the seed, then the wheel rolled over, patting the dirt firmly down.
The horse drawn machines were a welcome addition to the farm. After years of walking along behind plows, bending over to hoe weeds, and working through a field on foot during harvest, farmers welcomed a chance to "farm sitting down."
Hand husking (picking) corn was slow, difficult work. As each ear was picked it was tossed into the wagon. The high board on one side is called a bang board. It acted much like the basketball backboard. The farmer tossed the ear of corn, it hit the board and dropped into the wagon.
Sometimes farmers harvested the whole corn plant at once. Corn stalks are heavy, and setting them up in a shock was back-breaking work. A machine to cut down and tie corn stalks into bundles helped make the harvesting of corn faster and easier. But the bundles still had to be lifted, stacked and tied into shocks.
Early Iowa farmers grew several small grain crops like wheat and oats. Wheat was made into flour and then into bread. Oats were fed to livestock. Before machinery, grain harvest took a lot of work for the whole family.
The grain harvest was hard work. When the grain had ripened on the stalk, it was cut with a cradle. At the bottom of the cradle was a scythe that sliced through the stalks close to the ground. The cradle of wooden rods caught up the loose stalks as the farmer swung the cradle around, and the stalks fell to the ground in neat rows. A helper then tied the stalks into bundles and set them into shocks to dry.
The bundles were then spread out on the ground or the barn floor on a large sheet of canvas. Farmers beat the stalks with flails, short wooden sticks tied onto a longer pole by a leather thong. Flailing knocked the grain loose from the stalks. The stalks went gathered up and saved as straw. The kernels of grain left on the canvas were put in a winnowing tray. They were tossed in the air several times so that the wind could blow away this husks and chaff that covered the kernels and small pieces of straw mixed in. The process was call winnowing. Only after all these steps did the farmer have clean oats or wheat.
Toward the end of the 19th century, machines pulled by horses began to replace hand power in the grain harvest. By then Iowa farmers were not growing much wheat but they needed oats to feed the horses.
For thousands of years, farmers all over the world had cut, shocked, flailed and winnowed grains the same way. Machines changed all that very quickly. Horse-drawn reapers cut the grain, and binders tied the stalks into bundles.
When the grain was dry, the threshing team arrived. Because the operation with machines required many workers, men from up to a dozen farms worked together for several weeks, moving from farm to farm when the grain was ripe until all the grain was harvested. Some members of the crew loaded the bundles onto a wagon and hauled them to a threshing machine. The machine usually looked like a railroad locomotive. It had a firebox that burned coal to produce steam, and the steam drove wheels and gears that operated a conveyor belt. Black smoke poured out of the chimney and a piercing steam whistle signaled farmers when it was time to start and stop work.
Teams of horses pulled the wagons loaded with bundles close to the big conveyor belt. Farmers on the threshing team climbed to the top of the pile and began pitching bundles onto the moving belt. A rotating knife cute the twine holding the bundles together. Then the stalks of oats were pitched into a series of beaters that knocked the heads from the grain (flailing). The breeze from the operation blew the stalks and chaff into a straw pile while the clean grain dropped into a waiting wagon (winnowing). When the wagon was full, the crew drove it to the barn where it was stored in a grain bin.
Farm women also worked long hours during threshing time. Whenever a crew came to a farm, it was the job of the women there to fix a huge noon meal for the men. Sometimes women from neighboring farms came in to help. The meal usually had beef, chicken or pork (sometimes all three), mashed potatoes and gravy, vegetables from the garden, pickles, bread, butter, jams and jellies, and large slices of pie and cake for dessert. Often the women set up long tables in the shade in the yard where it was cooler than the hot kitchen. The women knew that the men could not help comparing the cooking from one farm to the next, and the women worked hard to make the beast meals they could. The men on the threshing crew went back to work in the afternoon well fed.
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Agriculture has been around since the dawn of time, but if you look at the ways we farmed in the past and compare them to how we do things today, the differences are astounding. Farmers own larger stretches of land, bigger, more efficient machinery, and use innovative farming methods that previous farmers had little to no knowledge of, such as gene editing or vertical farming. The evolution of farming and farm machinery has allowed for the cultivation of more land, higher-quality produce, and less back-breaking labor for farmers, among other notable benefits and improvements.
As more innovations are made and agriculture evolves further, who knows what kind of brilliant feats we could accomplish? In this guide on agriculture and farm machinery throughout the years, we'll explain how the science of agriculture and farm machinery has changed over the years and how these changes have benefitted the farmers of today.
Humans have been growing produce and domesticating animals for almost as long as we've existed. The science of agriculture began and developed in unique ways across the globe, with farmers domesticating different crops and animals depending on the climate, soil quality, and availability of various species. The earliest crops consisted mainly of wild grains, which humans started collecting and eating over 105 thousand years ago. The Neolithic founder crops—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas, and flax—were cultivated in the Levant sometime around 9500 BC.
From there, different regions began gradually domesticating new crops and animals. In 6200 BC, farmers in ancient China domesticated rice, mung, soy, and azuki beans. The Mesopotamia region, which is home to modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, and Syria, domesticated pigs and sheep, while cattle were domesticated in the areas that would eventually become Turkey and India.
It wasn't until the Bronze Age that agriculture started to intensify. Regions such as Mesopotamian Sumer, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, ancient China, and ancient Greece all started farming on a larger scale during this time. The Iron Age resulted in some of the earliest innovations in agriculture. Citizens from Rome, the ancient Mediterranean, and Western Europe built upon existing systems of agriculture and established the manorial system that became the bedrock of medieval architecture.
During the Middle Ages, agriculture benefitted from the implementation of new techniques and the diffusion of crop plants, which led to the introduction of sugar, rice, cotton, and fruit trees. It wasn't until after the voyages of Christopher Columbus that New World crops, including maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc, were brought to Europe, and Old World crops—including wheat, barley, rice, turnips, and livestock such as horses, cattle, sheep, and goats—were brought to the Americas.
After the Neolithic Revolution, irrigation, crop rotation, and fertilizers were introduced to the agriculture world. The invention of crop rotation was especially valuable. Farmers quickly realized that repeatedly growing the same crop on the same piece of land depleted the soil of nutrients. To avoid a decrease in soil fertility, they started practicing crop rotation by planting different crops in a regular sequence. The nutrients that were depleted by the growth of one crop were restored by planting a different crop that could return the necessary nutrients to the soil.
In ancient Roman, African, and Asian cultures, crop rotation was a common practice. During the Middle Ages, farmers in Europe practiced a three-year crop rotation method, with rye or winter wheat grown during the first year, spring oats or barley grown during the second, and no crops grown during the third. The British agriculturalist Charles Townshend popularized a four-crop rotation method in the 18th century, which involved rotations of wheat, barley, turnips, and clover. This method was brought to the United States by George Washington Carver.
In recent years, human labor has been steadily replaced by mechanization, with synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and selective breeding aiding in the production of high-quality and mass-produced crops. The concept of organic farming is another recent invention and is highly likely to gain traction and become more advanced over time.
To fully understand agriculture and farm machinery throughout the years, you have to focus on both the science and the tools. As our methods for farming evolved and the number of domesticated crops and animals available to farmers grew, the tools and machinery used for agriculture advanced as well. The earliest farming tools—flint axes, sickles, and pitchforks—were a reliable option for tending to smaller fields, but as the amount of farmland that each farmer owned increased, there was a rush to create more efficient tools for cultivating the land and caring for livestock. Let's take a look at some of the key agricultural inventions over the past few centuries and how they helped make different processes easier and more efficient for farmers.
Farmers used to handle their grain in bags as opposed to in bulk. As one might expect, this wasn't very convenient. The first grain elevator, built by Joseph Dart in 1842, was designed to make stockpiling and storing grain more efficient. The earliest grain elevators were constructed from framed or cribbed wood, which made them prone to fires. Today, most grain elevators are made from steel or reinforced concrete, and there are now close to 10,000 grain elevators across the United States. Over half of them are located in the top ten farming states, which includes California, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Indiana.
The process of hand-milking cows and other milk-producing animals is time-consuming and inefficient. The milking machine, patented by Anna Baldwin in 1879, was designed to streamline the process. Anna Baldwin's milking machine consisted of a vacuum device that was connected to a hand pump. Despite being one of the earliest American patents, it wasn't particularly successful. More practical versions of the milking machine were invented later. For example, automatic milking machines, also known as voluntary milking machines, became commercially available in the 1990s.
The first cotton harvester was patented in 1859 but wasn't popularized until the 1940s. Mechanical cotton harvesters come in two types: strippers and pickers. The stripper removes opened and unopened bolls from the plant, along with leaves and stems. The cotton gin removes any unwanted material from the picked cotton. The pickers remove cotton from open bolls, leaving the bur on the plant. The spindles penetrate the plants, and the cotton fibers are removed by a doffer. Finally, the cotton is delivered to a basket that's carried above the machine. This piece of machinery, much like the cotton gin, made it easier to pick and separate the cotton from the plant.
It used to take a family an entire day to harvest their crops. The invention of the combine changed that, allowing them to harvest an entire crop field in mere seconds. The first functional combine was designed by Hiram Moore and John Hascall of Kalamazoo County, Michigan. It was driven by mules, horses, or oxen and featured many of the same components as the modern combine. The combine only continued to evolve from there. Inventors worked on streamlining the harvesting process and creating new versions of the combine, including ones that were steam-powered, tractor-pulled, and self-propelled. The majority of today's combines are rotary combines, which offer multi-crop threshing, rotary separation, and other optional equipment, including data collection and touchscreen monitors.
Similar to the equipment in agriculture, tractor tires have evolved significantly over the years. The earliest tractors were outfitted with heavy, steel wheels that made for a loud and uncomfortable driving experience. The invention of pneumatic tires made tractor driving a much more pleasant experience. It also provided farmers with tires that could be used on both the farm and the road, wasted less fuel, and could handle more wear and tear, including damages presented by inclement weather and less-than-ideal road conditions. Dawson Tire & Wheel knows how important innovation is to agriculture, which is why we provide innovative, high-quality agricultural wheels to farmers who are looking to improve their equipment's efficiency and streamline their workday. Come and shop with us today!