In 1900 farmers represented 38 percent of the U.S. labor force. By the end of the century that number had plunged to 3 percent—dramatic evidence of the revolution in agriculture brought about by mechanization. Beginning with the internal combustion engine and moving on to rubber tires that kept machinery from sinking in muddy soil, mechanization also improved the farm implements designed for planting, harvesting, and reaping. The advent of the combine, for example, introduced an economically efficient way to harvest and separate grain. As the century closed, "precision agriculture" became the practice, combining the farmer's down-to-earth know-how with space-based technology.
| 1902 |
First U.S. factory for tractors driven by an internal combustion engine Charles Hart and Charles Parr establish the first U.S. factory devoted to manufacturing a traction engine powered by an internal combustion engine. Smaller and lighter than its steam-driven predecessors, it runs all day on one tank of fuel. Hart and Parr are credited with coining the term "tractor" for the traction engine. |
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| 1904 |
First crawler tractor with tracks rather than wheels Benjamin Holt, a California manufacturer of agricultural equipment, develops the first successful crawler tractor, equipped with a pair of tracks rather than wheels. Dubbed the "caterpillar" tread, the tracks help keep heavy tractors from sinking in soft soil and are the inspiration for the first military tanks. The 1904 version is powered by steam; a gasoline engine is incorporated in 1906. The Caterpillar Tractor Company is formed in 1925, in a merger of the Holt Manufacturing Company and its rival, the C. L. Best Gas Traction Company. |
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| 1905 |
First agricultural engineering curriculum at Iowa State College Jay Brownlee Davidson designs the first professional agricultural engineering curriculum at then-Iowa State College. Courses include agricultural machines; agricultural power sources, with an emphasis on design and operation of steam tractors; farm building design; rural road construction; and field drainage. Davidson also becomes the first president of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in 1907, leading agricultural mechanization missions to the Soviet Union and China. |
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| 1917 |
Fordson tractor sells for $395 Henry Ford & Son Corporation—a spinoff of the Ford Motor Company— begins production of the Fordson tractor. Originally called the "automobile plow" and designed to work 10- to 12-acre fields, it costs as little as $395 and soon accounts for 50 percent of the worldwide market for tractors. |
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| 1918 |
American Harvestor manufactures the Ronning Harvestor American Harvester Company of Minneapolis begins manufacturing the horse-drawn Ronning Harvester, a corn silage harvester patented in 1915 by Minnesota farmers Andrean and Adolph Ronning. The Ronning machine uses and improves a harvester developed three years earlier by South Dakotan Joseph Weigel. The first field corn silage harvester was patented in 1892 by Iowan Charles C. Fenno. |
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| 1921 |
First major aerial dusting of crops U.S. Army pilots and Ohio entomologists conduct the first major aerial dusting of crops, spraying arsenate of lead over 6 acres of catalpa trees in Troy to control the sphinx caterpillar. Stricter regulations on pesticides and herbicides go into effect in the 1960s. |
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| 1922 |
International Harvester introduces a power takeoff International Harvester introduces a power takeoff feature, a device that allows power from a tractor engine to be transmitted to attached harvesting equipment. This innovation is part of the company’s signature Farmall tractor in 1924. The Farmall features a tricycle design with a high-clearance rear axle and closely spaced front wheels that run between crop rows. The four-cylinder tractor can also be mounted with a cultivator guided by the steering wheel. |
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| 1931 |
Caterpillar manufactures a crawler tractor with a diesel engine Caterpillar manufactures a crawler tractor with a diesel engine, which offers more power, reliability, and fuel efficiency than those using low-octane gasoline. Four years later International Harvester introduces a diesel engine for wheeled tractors. Several decades later diesel fuel would still be used for agricultural machinery. |
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| 1932 |
Rubber wheels improve the tractor An Allis-Chalmers Model U tractor belonging to Albert Schroeder of Waukesha, Wisconsin, is outfitted with a pair of Firestone 48X12 airplane tires in place of lugged steel wheels. Tests by the University of Nebraska Tractor Test Laboratory find that rubber wheels result in a 25 percent improvement in fuel economy. Rubber wheels also mean smoother, faster driving with less wear and tear on tractor parts and the driver. Minneapolis Marine Power Implement Company even markets a "Comfort Tractor" with road speeds up to 40 mph, making it usable on public roads or hauling grain or transporting equipment. |
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| 1932 |
First pickup baler manufactured The Ann Arbor Machine Company of Shelbyville, IIlinois, manufactures the first pickup baler, based on a 1929 design by Raymond McDonald. Six years later Edwin Nolt develops and markets a self-tying pickup baler. The baler, attached to a tractor, picks up cut hay in the field, shapes it into a 16-18-inch bale, and knots the twine that hold the bale secure. Self-propelled hay balers soon follow. |
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| 1933 |
Hydraulic draft control system developed Irish mechanic Harry Ferguson develops a tractor that incorporates his innovative hydraulic draft control system, which raises and lowers attached implements—such as tillers, mowers, post-hole diggers, and plows—and automatically sets their needed depth. The David Brown Company in England is the first to build the tractor, but Ferguson also demonstrates it to Henry Ford in the United States. With a handshake agreement, Ford manufactures Ferguson’s tractor and implements from 1939 to 1948. A few years later Ferguson’s company merges with Canadian company Massey-Harris to form Massey-Ferguson. |
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| 1935 |
First research on conservation tillage Agronomists Frank Duley and Jouette Russell at the University of Nebraska, along with other scientists with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, being the first research on conservation tillage. The practice involves various methods of tilling the soil, with stubble mulch and different types of plows and discs, to control wind erosion and manage crop residue. This technology is common on farms by the early 1960s. |
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| 1935 |
Rural Electrification Administration bring electricity to many farmers President Roosevelt issues an executive order to create the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), which forms cooperatives that bring electricity to millions of rural Americans. Within 6 years the REA has aided the formation of 800 rural electric cooperatives with 350,000 miles of power lines. |
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| 1938 |
First self-propelled combine In Australia, Massey-Harris introduces the first self-propelled combine—a thresher and reaper in a single machine—not drawn by a tractor or horse. Welcomed because it replaces the labor-intensive binder, handshocking, and threshing, the new combine becomes increasingly popular. By the end of the century, single-driver combines feature air-conditioned cabins that are lightly pressurized to keep out dirt and debris. |
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| 1943 |
First commercially viable mechanical spindle cotton picker International Harvester builds "Old Red," the first commercially viable mechanical spindle cotton picker, invented and tested by Texans John and Mack Rust beginning in 1927. The spindle picker features moistened rotating spindles that grab cotton fibers from open bolls while leaving the plant intact. The cotton fibers are then blown into waiting hoppers, free of debris. |
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| 1948 |
Center pivot irrigation machine invented Colorado farmer Frank Zybach invents the center pivot irrigation machine, which revolutionizes irrigation technology. The system consists of sprinklers attached to arms that radiate from a water-filled hub out to motorized wheeled towers in the field. Zybach is awarded a patent in 1952 for the "Self- Propelled Sprinkling Irrigating Apparatus." |
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| 1954 |
Corn head attachments for combines are introduced The John Deere and International Harvester companies introduce corn head attachments for their combines. This attachment rapidly replaces the self-propelled corn picker, which picked the corn and stripped off its husk. The corn head attachment also shells the ears in the field. The attachment allows a farmer to use just one combine, harvesting other grain crops in the summer and corn in the fall. |
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| 1956 |
The Gyral air seeder is patented The Gyral air seeder, which plants seeds through a pneumatic delivery system, is patented in Australia. The technology eventually evolves into large multirow machines with a trailing seed tank and often a second tank holding fertilizers. |
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| 1966 |
The DICKEY-john Manufacturing Company introduces electronic monitoring devices for farmers that allow them to plant crops more efficiently. Attached to mechanical planters and air seeders, the devices monitor the number and spacing of seeds being planted. The newest devices monitor the planting of up to 96 rows at a time. During the 1990s, similar devices are used at harvest time for yield mapping, or measuring and displaying the quality and quantity of a harvest as the combine moves through the field. |
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| 1994 |
Farmers begin using Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers Ushering in the new "precision agriculture," farmers begin using Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to record precise locations on their farms to determine which areas need particular quantities of water, fertilizer, and pesticides. The information can be stored on a card and transferred to a home computer. Farmers can now combine such data with yield information, weather forecasts, and soil analysis to create spreadsheets. These tools enable even greater efficiency in food production. |
When viewed across the span of the 20th century, the effect that mechanization has had on farm productivity—and on society itself—is profound. At the end of the 19th century it took, for example, 35 to 40 hours of planting and harvesting labor to produce 100 bushels of corn. A hundred years later producing the same amount of corn took only 2 hours and 45 minutes—and the farmers could ride in air-conditioned comfort, listening to music while they worked. And as fewer and fewer workers were needed on farms, much of the developed world has experienced a sea-change shift from rural to metropolitan living.
Throughout most of its long history, agriculture—particularly the growing of crops—was a matter of human sweat and draft animal labor. Oxen, horses, and mules pulled plows to prepare the soil for seed and hauled wagons filled with the harvest—up to 20 percent of which went to feed the animals themselves. The rest of the chores required backbreaking manual labor: planting the seed; tilling, or cultivating, to keep down weeds; and ultimately reaping the harvest, itself a complex and arduous task of cutting, collecting, bundling, threshing, and loading. From early on people with an inventive flair—perhaps deserving the title of the first engineers—developed tools to ease farming burdens. Still, even as late as the 19th century, farming and hard labor remained virtually synonymous, and productivity hadn't shifted much across the centuries.
At the turn of the 20th century the introduction of the internal combustion engine set the stage for dramatic changes. Right at the center of that stage was the tractor. It's not just a figure of speech to say that tractors drove the mechanization revolution. Tractors pulled plows. They hauled loads and livestock. Perhaps most importantly, tractors towed and powered the new planters, cultivators, reapers, pickers, threshers, combine harvesters, mowers, and balers that farm equipment companies kept coming out with every season. These vehicles ultimately became so useful and resourceful that farmers took to calling them simply GPs, for general purpose. But they weren't always so highly regarded. Early versions, powered by bulky steam engines, were behemoths, some weighing nearly 20 tons. Lumbering along on steel wheels, they were often mired in wet and muddy fields—practically worthless. Then in 1902 a pair of engineers named Charles Hart and Charles Parr introduced a tractor powered by an internal combustion engine that ran on gasoline. It was smaller and lighter than its steam-driven predecessors, could pull plows and operate threshing machines, and ran all day on a single tank of fuel. Hart and Parr's company was the first devoted exclusively to making tractors, a term they are also credited with introducing. Previously, tractors had been known as "traction engines."
The Hart-Parr Model 3 tractor was a commercial success, prompting no less a businessman than Henry Ford to get into the picture. In 1917 he introduced the Fordson, weighing as little as one ton and advertised to sell for as little as $395. The Fordson soon ruled the tractor roost, accounting for 75 percent of the U.S. market share and 50 percent of the worldwide share.
Nevertheless, the tractor business remained a competitive field, at least for a few decades, and competition helped foster innovations. Tractors themselves got smaller and more lightweight and were designed with a higher ground clearance, making them capable of such relatively refined tasks as hauling cultivating implements through a standing crop. Another early innovation, introduced by International Harvester in 1922, was the so-called power takeoff. This device consisted of a metal shaft that transmitted the engine power directly to a towed implement such as a reaper through a universal joint or similar mechanism; in other words, the implement "took off" power from the tractor engine. The John Deere Company followed in 1927 with a power lift that raised and lowered hitched implements at the end of each row—a time- and labor-saving breakthrough. Rubber tires designed for agricultural use came along in 1933, making it much easier for tractors to function even on the roughest, muddiest ground. And ever mindful of the power plant, engineers in the 1930s came up with diesel engines, which provided more power at a lower cost.
As tractor sales continued to climb—peaking in 1951, when some 800,000 tractors were sold in the United States—equally important developments were occurring on the other side of the hitch. Pulled and powered by tractors, an increasingly wide variety of farm implements were mechanizing just about every step in the crop-growing process, from the planting of seed to the harvesting of the final fruit. In the 1930s one particular type of machine—the combine—began to take its place beside the tractor as a must-have, especially for grain farmers. The combine had been a bold innovation when Hiram Moore developed the first marketable one in the 1830s. As its name indicated, it combined the two main tasks of grain harvesting: reaping, or cutting the stalks, and threshing, the process of separating the kernels of grain from the rest of the plant and then collecting the kernels. Early combines were pulled by large teams of horses and proved about as unwieldy as the first steam-powered tractors. But towed by the powerful new diesel tractors of the 1930s and taking their power off the tractors' engines, combines became the rage. They did it all: cutting, threshing, separating kernels from husks with blowers or vibrating sieves, filtering out straw, feeding the collected grain via conveyor belts to wagons or trucks driven alongside. This moving assembly line turned acre upon acre of waving amber fields into golden mountains of grain as if by magic.
The first self-propelled combine was developed in Australia in 1938, incorporating tractor and harvester in one, and improvements have been steady ever since. Today, the most impressive of these grain-handling machines can cut swaths more than 30 feet wide, track their own movements precisely through Global Positioning System satellites, and measure and analyze the harvest as they go. They are in no small measure responsible for a 600-fold increase in grain harvesting productivity.
The same basic combine design worked for all grain crops, but corn required a different approach. In 1900 corn was shucked by hand, the ears were thrown into a wagon, and the kernels were shelled by a mechanical device powered by horses. The first mechanical corn picker was introduced in 1909, and by the 1920s one- and two-row pickers powered by tractor engines were becoming popular. Massey-Harris brought the first self-propelled picker to the market in 1946, but the big breakthrough came in 1954, when a corn head attachment for combines became available, making it possible to shell corn in the field. The increase in productivity was dramatic. In 1900 one person could shuck about 100 bushels a day. By the end of the century, combines with eight-row heads could shuck and shell 100 bushels in less than 5 minutes!
The hay harvest also benefited from mechanization. In the 1930s mechanical hay balers were at work, but the process still required hand tying of the bales. In 1938 a man named Edwin Nolt invented a machine that automated bale tying, and the New Holland Manufacturing Company incorporated it into a pickup baler that it began marketing in 1941. As in the case of the combine, self-propelled versions soon followed.
Soon just about anything could be harvested mechanically. Pecans and other nuts are now gathered by machines that grab the trees and shake them, a method that also works for fruits such as cherries, oranges, lemons, and limes. Even tomatoes and grapes, which require delicate handling to avoid bruising, can be harvested mechanically, as can a diverse assortment of vegetables such as asparagus, radishes, cabbages, cucumbers, and peas.
Mechanical engineering ingenuity found solutions for even more problematic crops—the worst of which was probably cotton. In the long history of cotton's cultivation, no one had come up with a better way to harvest this scraggly tenacious plant than the labor-intensive process of plucking it by hand. The cotton gin, invented in 1794 by Eli Whitney, mechanized the post-harvest process of extracting the cotton fibers from the seedpod, or boll, but no really successful efforts at mechanizing the picking of cotton occurred until the 1930s. In that decade, brothers John and Mack Rust of Texas demonstrated several different versions of a spindle picker, a device consisting of moistened rotating spindles that grabbed the cotton fibers from open bolls, leaving the rest of the plant intact; the fibers were then blown into hoppers. Spindle pickers produced cotton that was as clean as or cleaner than handpicked cotton; soon they replaced earlier stripper pickers, which stripped opened and unopened bolls alike, leaving a lot of trash in with the fibers. The Rust brothers' designs had one shortcoming: They couldn't be mass produced on an assembly line. Thus credit goes to International Harvester for developing the first commercially viable spindle picker in 1943, known affectionately as Old Red.
Whatever their nature, one thing all crops need is water, and here again the effect of mechanization has been profound. At the beginning of the 20th century, only about 16 million acres of land in the United States were irrigated, typically by intricate networks of gated channels that fed water down crop rows. Most farmers still depended almost exclusively on rain falling directly on their fields. Then in the 1940s a tenant farmer and sometime inventor from eastern Colorado named Frank Zybach devised something better—a system that consists of sprinklers attached to a pipe that runs from a hub out to a motorized tower on wheels. As the tower moves, the sprinkler pipe rotates around the hub, irrigating the field in a grand circular sweep. Now known as center pivot irrigation, Zybach's system was patented in 1952 as the Self-Propelled Sprinkling Irrigating Apparatus. Along with other mechanized systems, it has almost quadrupled irrigated acreage in the United States and has also been used to apply both fertilizers and pesticides.
Mechanization has come to the aid of another critical aspect of agriculture—namely, soil conservation. An approach known as conservation tillage has greatly reduced, or even eliminated, traditional plowing, which can cause soil erosion and loss of nutrients and precious moisture. Conservation tillage includes the use of sweep plows, which undercut wheat stubble but leave it in place above ground to help restrict soil erosion by wind and to conserve moisture. The till plant system is another conservation-oriented approach. Corn stalks are left in place to reduce erosion and loss of moisture, and at planting time the next year the row is opened up, the seeds are planted, and the stalks are turned over beside the row, to be covered up by cultivation. This helps conserve farmland by feeding nutrients back into the soil.
As the century unfolded, everything about farming was changing—not the least its fundamental demographics. In 1900 farmers made up 38 percent of the U.S. labor force; by the end of the century they represented less than 3 percent. With machines doing most of the work, millions of farmers and farm laborers had to look elsewhere for a living—a displacement that helped fuel booms in the manufacturing and service industries, especially after World War II. It also fueled a dramatic shift in the entire culture, as metropolitan and suburban America began to replace the rural way of life. Although some may lament the passing of the agrarian way of life, in much of the developing world these transformations represent hope. The many ways in which agriculture has been changed by engineering—from new methods for land and resource management to more efficient planting and harvesting to the development of better crop varieties—offer the potential solution to the endemic problems of food shortage and economic stagnation.
Donald Johnson
Retired Vice President
Product and Process Technology
Grain Processing Corporation
When I was growing up in north-central Illinois, I watched corn and soybeans being brought to my little rural community's grain elevators in wagons pulled by tractors and sometimes even horses. Talk of 50 bushels per acre of corn was big news as we scrambled to pick up spilled soybeans to arm our peashooters. It was nearly halfway through the 20th century then, and U.S. corn production, the benchmark crop, averaged less than 30 bushels per acre, only slightly higher than at the turn of the century. Over four people resided on and operated an average-sized, 160-acre farm. Farms now average more than twice that size and are commonly operated by only one person.
The big growth in crop yields occurred after the Second World War, increasing more than five-fold through new agricultural practices and hybrid development. Productivity, however, increased by more than 50-fold over the course of the 20th century, due for the most part to mechanization. It is this fantastic productivity that keeps agricultural crops abundantly available at affordable prices as a raw material for industrial products as well as for foodstuffs. Mechanization has made the United States the "breadbasket of the world," and, more than that, it provides the springboard for sustainability on the planet.
My own career encompasses utilizing agricultural crops in the commodity grain-processing industry, an industry that converts oilseeds and grains into millions of pounds per day of foodstuffs, sweeteners, fuels, chemicals, building products, paper adjuvants, and even plastics. This huge industry is but a segment of the broader agricultural commodities industry. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, and the magazines we read all depend on agricultural crops. They have experienced the least cost inflation of most commodities and a stable supply because of the ingenuity and inventiveness of mechanical and agricultural engineers. Together, the invention and development of implements to plant, cultivate, harvest, and transport agricultural crops efficiently and regardless of unfavorable weather conditions are truly a wondrous and critical achievement.
This fascinating story will continue to unfold throughout the 21st century as we more completely embrace the concept of "sustainability." Fuels, chemicals, and materials will of necessity have to be derived from renewable resources. New crops, new agricultural practices, and new mechanical devices will have to be developed to sustain feeding, clothing, housing, and the quality of life of the growing world population.