Farm Mechanization

Appears in

Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

Published 2004

About

In the late eighteenth century, American farms had much in common with the European farms of the Middle Ages. Farms were labor intensive: fields could be cultivated, plowed, and harrowed with animal-drawn equipment, but planting, tilling, weeding, harvesting, collecting, bundling, threshing, and loading required manual labor. Moreover, farmers were conservative by nature, and little had changed on American farms since early Colonial times.

During the late eighteenth century, however, the methods of growing, raising, and processing food began to change: some farmers began adopting newer enhanced European agricultural practices, such as the use of organic fertilizers, crop rotation, and livestock breeding systems. New equipment, such as the seed drill for sowing seeds, which had been invented in England by Jethro Tull in 1701, also became common in the United States. The introduction of the cradle and scythe helped make harvesting grains easier. Thomas Jefferson experimented with the use of moldboards (curved metal plow blades that lift and turn over soil) and came up with a workable design in 1794. The cast iron plow was patented in 1797.