The Henry Ford Museum was established in 1929 to preserve and showcase American history and innovation. When we visited the museum in 2018, I don’t think I knew that its purpose was to highlight American innovation, so today’s walk through the museum gave me a whole new perspective on what I was seeing. In this first post we’ll be looking at how farming changed from the early 1800s to today—and how farming keeps on changing as new machines get larger and do more. Since my Dad came from a farming family, and I saw his Dad and his sister’s farms in the 1950s, this walk through the history of farming and how life has changed for farmers over the years means so much to me. I hope you like it too.
changes in farming in America
However, today only 1.5% of all Americans live on farms, but their work—raising crops and tending livestock—occupies a remarkable 40% of the U.S. landmass.
First we’ll see the implements that set the stage for production agriculture, and then we’ll see others that remain essential to alternative and small-scale farming today.
Across America, farmers grow hundreds of different crops, and each requires specialized handling at harvest time. Pick-your-own orchard experiences draw crowds, but most farmers harvest crops with machines. Switching from hand to machine harvesting comes at a cost.
- Technology displaces laborers.
- Plant engineering reduces genetic diversity.
- Chemical applications may manage pests and weeds, but many believe they also put the health of the picker, the consumer, and the environment at risk.
canned food: Farm families grew much of their own food until the early 1900s. Companies met increased demand for canned goods by contracting with farmers to raise more beans, tomatoes, sweet corn, and pumpkins. Inexpensive processed food filled grocery store shelves and farmhouse pantries.
domestication: For centuries, farmers selected seed from the highest yielding plants to ensure a bountiful crop. Plant breeders went a step further by cross-pollinating plants to create new varieties.
During the later 1980s, insertion of foreign DNA into plant cells became commercially viable as the next step in plant engineering. Today, those “transgenic” or genetically modified organisms (GMOs) dominate cash-crop production, as well as conversations about sustainable agriculture and food security.
Soil requires care to produce healthy crops year after year, and farmers prepare seed beds by plowing and harrowing. As plants grow, they draw nutrients from the soil. Farmers then have to apply natural fertilizers (livestock manure) or synthetic chemicals in liquid or granular form to support plant growth.
Changing technology—mechanical, chemical, and biological—reduces labor but also raises concerns about human and environmental health.
land: Early on, the United States financed its natural expansion through sales so public lands, but those sales created problems. The land transfer displaced American Indians and destroyed their cultures. Intensive cultivation of wheat and other cash crops on semi-arid lands helped feed the world but destroyed ecosystems. Farmers, agricultural scientists, and environmentalists still seek balance.
fertilizer: The demand for plant nutrients exceeded the supply of available livestock manure by the mid-1800s. To provide alternatives, entrepreneurs imported bird and bat guano and processed slaughterhouse waste into bone meal.
By the mid-1900s, chemical plants produced synthetic alternatives with mixtures of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) to meet the needs both of farmers and suburban lawn-keepers.
Farmers raise grain to sell, but they also raise grain and grasses for their livestock to eat. Before agriculture was mechanized, harvesting grains and grasses required intense human labor.
Farmers responded by increasing the size of their fields of grain and hay knowing that their machines could harvest large crops at the perfect time—if the equipment worked and the weather remained fair.
grains: Most humans eat grains. Harvesting grains required intense physical labor before the 1830s. It was at this time when inventors in Maryland and Virginia first built mechanical reapers and mowers. The manufactures moved west with the settlers, building implement factories near grain farmers as the wheat belt extended into the Great Plains.
grasses: Grasses keep most livestock healthy. Free-range livestock eat grass when grazing, but farmers cut and dry grasses and legumes to make hay for year-round livestock feed.
Farmers supplement feed with silage made from green corn stalks or alfalfa. They cut and chop it, carefully store and ferment it, and feed it to the animals to maintain weight and milk production.
machines that changed over the years
1834: Enoch Ambler in Spencertown, New York, patented this “machine for cutting grass or grain by horse power.”
While his machine never became a commercial success, its moving metal blade, or sickle-bar, became a standard feature in later harvesters.
1876: The D.S. Morgan & Co. in New York created this “Triumph” self-raking reaper. They became a lucrative agricultural machinery business that inspired inventors to improve upon horse-drawn reapers.
Once cut, the grain accumulated on a platform until the reel swept down and raked the grain from the platform onto the ground. Laborers then walked along, picking up the deposited cut grain (called a “gavel”) and binding it into sheaves.
1886: The Aultman & Taylor Company invented a steam tractor engine. Engineers burned firewood or coal to generate the steam that propelled this engine and provided power for threshing machines and other devices.
The ritual continued through the 1930s until self-propelled steam engines and the crews that used them started working on the farms.
1895: The Fish Brothers in Racine, Wisconsin, devised this horse-drawn farm wagon that had high enough sides so husked ears of corn could be hauled to the corncrib.
Workers shucked the ears (snapping them off the stalk) and husked them (removing the outer covering of the ear), then threw them into the wagon to be hauled to a corncrib for later shelling (removing the kernels from the cob).
1916: The Avery Company in Peoria, Illinois, came up with this self-propelled “traction” engine that could move from farm to farm under its own steam.
At harvest time, the engine ran a threshing machine that separated kernels from gain grown on those large fields. A steam engineer safely operated the machine.
1952: The New Holland Machine Company in New Holland, Pennsylvania, created this forage harvester. Dairy farmers used tractor-drawn forage harvesters to make nutritious silage for their cattle. [Per SI, “Silage is fodder made from green foliage crops which have been preserved by fermentation to the point of souring.”]
Other attachments harvested grasses or legumes. Farmers blew the chopped material into a silo where the airless space preserved the livestock feed.
more power
It took 60 years for internal combustion engines to replace draft animals on the farm. Draft animals endured because of the mutual dependency that existed between humans and animals and between the processes of growing crops and raising livestock.
Ultimately engines spread to every aspect of farm work, powering everything from cream separators to corn shellers. Automobiles replaced horses and carriages. Tractors replaced draft horses.
byproducts and bioproducts: Maize, an American staple, feeds cattle, hogs, and humans. Today, maize goes to market as corn but is turned into numerous products, including bioplastics, ethanol, oil, and whiskey.
Soybean, an Asian staple, first caught the eye of U.S. farmers as a legume to sustain the soil and a forage crop for livestock feed. Scientists have experimented with soy oil in paints and polymers and as alternative proteins. By the early 1970s, soy overtook corn as America’s leading cash crop.
seeds and science: Farmers historically saved their best seed to replant year after year. After hybrid corn became commercially viable by the mid-1930s, saving seed became an obsolete practice, unless farmers and gardeners remained committed to open-pollinated varieties.
Patents for plants that would not develop in nature began in 1930. This increased investment in plant genetic research. Today, nearly all cash-crops grown in the United States exist because of transgenic research.
1928: The New Idea Spreader Company in Coldwater, Ohio, developed a two-row picker-husker that changed the corn harvest from a ritual to a mechanical process.
A farm family with this machine could harvest 15 acres of corn per day and load that corn into a wagon to haul from the field. Harvesting technology facilitated the change from corn being raised as hog feed to corn being raised for starch, ethanol, and corn syrup.
1938: Tom Carroll from the Massey-Harris Company in Toronto, Ontario, spent 50 years working with harvesting equipment on three continents to perfect this self-propelled combine.
The machine could maneuver over rough terrain, required only one operator, and eliminated grain loss. The lighter and affordable Model 21 that was released in 1940 became an instant commercial success due to labor shortages during the war years.
1975: The Sperry Rand Corporation in New Holland, Pennsylvania, created this axial flow combine that revolutionized both corn and grain harvesting.
It shucked the ears off cornstalks, husked the ears, and shelled the kernels from the cob. Farmers could replace the corn header with a flex header to harvest grain and soybeans. This combine, designed for display at international trade shows, promoted axial flow, a threshing system mounted diagonally in the body of the machine, as well as new safety features highlighted with labels.
Now let’s go to the next post that will highlight some of the other changes in life that the Henry Ford Museum showed us.
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