However, mechanizing food-gathering has also led to attempts to breed foods that can better withstand machines, sometimes leading to less tasteful fruits and vegetables. Finally, by speeding the farming process and reducing the amount of work to a manageable level, machines such as McCormick's reaper have let a single person farm an incredibly large amount of land. In addition, by reducing the manpower required to bring in a harvest of many crops, mechanization has helped reduce the cost and much of the uncertainty of the harvest time. By removing the dependence on less predictable animals, tractors and harvesting equipment have made planting and harvesting crops more predictable, giving farmers the ability to better plan their activities and the results in advance. Regardless of any other factors, horses or oxen can fall ill, jeopardizing a harvest if they cannot be cured in time. ![]() It is highly dependent on weather conditions and, if using animals for heavy work, is also highly dependent on the ability to feed, water, and care for the animals. This, in turn, has led to interesting situations in global politics.įarming, even with the assistance of machinery, is hard, dirty, back-breaking labor. It has also led to the strange situation in which developed nations sometimes pay farmers to leave land fallow or to burn grain while in less developed countries, people starve. The technological and mechanized society in which most of the developed world finds itself. In inventing the reaper, Cyrus McCormick set in motion events that would profoundly affect farm life and rural communities and that helped to make possible Over the centuries and millennia, complex civilizations and technology were built around agriculture. ![]() This gave nonfarmers the opportunity to invent forms of government, written languages, and to develop technologies that were not available to hunter-gatherers who spent their entire existence struggling to survive. The development of agriculture allowed a relatively few farmers to grow food for many. The mechanization of agriculture has continued to the present day and, even today, agricultural engineers continue to work to automate and mechanize some of the most arduous and time-consuming tasks that remain. The combine was only the first of many mechanical farm implements to be developed, and the development of internal combustion engines made them even more efficient. In 1871, the reaper was mated with a mechanical thresher to form the first combine, a single machine that would cut wheat plants and thresh the grain at the same time. Already increasingly popular in the United States, McCormick's reapers spread overseas, helping to revolutionize agriculture in Europe and elsewhere. He presented his reaper to the world at the 1851 Great Exposition in London, winning acclaim and increasing orders almost immediately. In 1847 he opened his first factory, near the city of Chicago, then a small and unimportant town. McCormick built his first reaper in 1831, at the age of 22. This limited a farm's productivity to the amount of grain and the number of acres that could be maintained by a single person or family with occasional assistance. Although attempts were made to automate parts of this process, they were unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. The grain was then bundled together by hand and brought to a central place where grains were separated from the stalks and chaff using technology that dated back to the earliest farmers. This placed severe constraints on not just farmers, but on society as a whole because workers in the fields were not available to operate factories, provide nonfarm services, or perform any of the other tasks upon which a technological society rests.įor thousands of years grain was harvested by people wielding scythes and other manual cutting devices. However, for most of human history, growing grain and other crops has been wholly dependent on the availability of human labor for field preparation, planting, and harvesting. Many have argued convincingly that the development of agriculture is what allowed nomadic hunter-gatherers to develop written language, cities, civilization, and more. BackgroundĪgriculture, the domestication of plant and animal species for food production, is arguably the most important development in human history. Further refinements gave rise to the combine and other mechanical devices that have made it possible for a relatively small number of farmers to maintain and harvest thousands of acres of crops and to feed thousands of people each year. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884) developed the first device to reliably and effectively cut and gather grain in the field. ![]() Cyrus McCormick Invents the Reaping Machine Overview
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