Farm Machinery

Farm Machinery. American farmers first used mechanized equipment during the Revolutionary War, when some farmers adopted grain drills (seed‐planting devices) based on English designs. A successful American innovation did not occur until 1841, however, when Moses and Samuel Pennock of Pennsylvania significantly improved the design of this implement to facilitate more uniform planting of seed. American farmers continued to plant corn with a hoe until 1853 when George Brown of Illinois marketed a two‐row, horse‐drawn corn planter.

In 1833, Obed Hussey patented the first successful reaper for small grains. This device consisted of an oscillating sickle bar and a platform to catch the cut stalks. The next year, Cyrus McCormick of Virginia patented a reaper that included a reel to help catch and hold the stalks against an improved cutter bar. In 1854, the Brockport, New York, firm of Seymour and Morgan marketed the first commercially successful self‐raking reaper, which automatically removed the stalks from the platform. By 1860 the reaper had spread across the Middle West, and the McCormick factory in Chicago had become one of the nation's great manufacturers of farm machinery. Although a machine designed to cut grain and bind sheaves with wire was patented in 1856, farmers disliked wire, in part because they could not easily dispose of it at threshing time. In 1880, twine binders began to replace wire binders after John Appleby of Wisconsin developed a mechanism for tying a knot in twine wrapped around a sheaf of grain. Reapers and binders enabled farmers to harvest from ten to twenty acres of grain per day, depending on field conditions, with far less labor than that required to cut the grain with a scythe and rake and bind the sheaves by hand. The next significant increase in daily harvested acreage and decrease in the labor needed at harvest and threshing time came with the adoption of the tractor‐powered combine harvester threshers, called combines, during the 1920s.

During the twentieth century, tractors powered by internal combustion engines became the most important and widely adopted agricultural implement in American history. In 1918, Henry Ford marketed the first affordable farm tractor, known as the “Fordson”. Six years later, the International Harvester Company (successor to the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company) introduced the “Farmall,” a tricycle‐designed tractor that met the needs of small‐scale, row‐crop farmers.

The cotton picker, developed in the early 1940s, became the most important twentieth‐century farm machine for a specific, regional crop. Before the International Harvester Company manufactured the first commercially successful cotton picker in 1942, however, scientists had to modify the cotton plant to eliminate foliage and ensure uniform ripening. The cotton picker initially proved most suitable for large‐scale operations in California, but in time it supplanted handpickers in the South as well.

These and other forms of agricultural machinery enabled farmers to reduce labor costs and increase production, which contributed to lower agricultural and food prices. Farm machinery also eased the drudgery of farm work, but it necessitated an increase in farm size and capital investment and caused a corresponding decrease in the number of farms, farm workers, and agricultural families.
See also Agricultural Education and Extension; Agriculture; Cotton Industry; Fairs, County and State; Industrialization.

Bibliography

Robert C. Williams , Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin' Johnny: A History of the Farm Tractor and Its Impact on America, 1987.
R. Douglas Hurt , American Agriculture: A Brief History, 1994.

R. Douglas Hurt