Farm advancement

JWalker

Member
While working this morning, I got to thinking (my wife says this
is dangerous). Excluding the internal combustion engine, what
would you say has revolutionized farming the most in the last
100 years?

I have an idea in mind. I will post my vote later.
 
I'm kinda split between no-til and round balers. The round baler has allowed me to put up five times as much hay without help, and no-till farming has allowed me to put in a great deal more corn with fewer trips across a field and a whole lot less labor to finish a crop out.
 
When one sees "internal combustion engine" you automatically think of machinery, etc. but Rural Electrification deserves a ranking near the top, also.
 
The Haber-Bosch Process of making Amonia. from the article: Fertilizer generated from ammonia produced by the Haber process is estimated to be responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population.[6] It is estimated that half of the protein within human beings is made of nitrogen that was originally fixed by this process; the remainder was produced by nitrogen fixing bacteria and archaea.[7]
The process was invented earlier but was not made in quantity as noted till 1914. 1913 in BASF's Oppau plant in Germany, production reaching 20 tonnes/day the following year.[1
So it is 100 years!!! Jim
 
I see two things that without them farming could not have made any other advancements. The first is the reaper which goes back almost 200 years so that don't count in your 100 years question. The other is the Farmall tractor that made it possible to raise row crops mechanically.
 
I assume you mean crop framing and not livestock farming. Herbicides drastically changed tillage for row crops, but without artificial fertilizers we would not have been able to take advantage of all the other crop enhancements. So my vote is for artificial fertilizers.

In recent times, foreign grain sales and crop insurance have done the most to improve grain farm profits.
 

Mechanized harvesting, hands down.

As soon as the combine came along acres per farmer started upward.
 
I suspect it may depend on what kind of farming you are doing. Dairy, crop, livestock, truck, etc.. you just might get an entirely different response from each type farmer and rightly so. Chemicals are not as important to dairy farming as they are to crop..at least the way we are farming in a conventional sense now .. However, the most revolutionary decision might just be in the political realm when "Washington" didn't heed the warnings and economic philosophies of Wilkens who championed 90 -100% parity prices for commodities/farmers in the late 40s. Or to a lessor extent the demise of the Glass-Stegall act of 1999. The result is a commodities market that determines the rather sometimes paltry prices paid to farmers and the resultant damage to our rural communities and the family farms. Establish a category regarding the term "revolutionary"..and describe good revolutionary change or bad and not sustainable change... for there is plenty of examples. There are many passing fads that were called revolutionary in their time..case and point the use of rGBH, which in the final analysis was uncovered to be a sham fostered upon the dairy farmer by the Bio-Tech industry with help by the land grant colleges... which didn't do anything but make more money for the "inventor"... and in the final analysis was "revolutionary".. if making money off the backs of hard working dairy farmers can be categorized as such....
 
Given that these are forums dedicated to machinery, I think that livestock is going to take a back seat to crops...but then again I am not sure it matters as they are all tied one to the other.

That being said I side with Iowa Gary and say mechanical harvesting. Combines, balers, beet harvesters, etc.
 
True But if we factor in harvester systems when should we start, Cyruc McCormick, reaper was made into a combine through the application of mergine technologies of threshing machines and engines. My argument is just the fuzzy start date of "mechanical harvesting" and 100 years. Jim
 
Firsts combine was 1835 with the first commercial one being available in 1885, hose/mule drawn. Holt built the first self propelled one in 1911. So mechanical harvesting cannot be counted in the "last 100" years.

To me it would have to be something that would be a stayer. Still going to be here in 100 years, like mechanical harvesters. So I'd vote with hydraulics as a standard feature.

Rick
 
I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned the modern milking system. It sure made chores a lot easier and allowed the dairy farmer to milk a lot more cows in a shorter time period. Just my thoughts, Keith
 
Seed research, with hybreds, is big. Big jump in yield with same land.

Mechanical stuff, like hydraulics, tractor itself, better harvester, is all big. Eliminate the horses with petrolium fuels and you just gained about 50% of your land - don't bed to feed the horses all year long, rip out the hay and put in corn.

Electricity was big, saved a whole lot of labor. Farm products got a lot cheaper.

Tile and drainage, was huge in this region, makes a lot of the best ground farmable.

Chemicals, from weed control, insect control, mastitis control, etc has done wonders to productivity.

All very good. Many had their start before WWI, and are before our times? I agree on REA I guess, but electricity was around before that....

This era, the computer will be the deal. Started as a calculator back in the 60s, It controls our engines, our accounting, our fertilizer calculations, our everything. Sci fi used to write about robots doing everything for us; they were a bit off, it is computers that are taking over.

Planter monitors, auto shifting, fuel feeding, hydraulic controlling, milk rooms, grain drying, irrigation systems, anything on a planter or combine these days.....

Paul
 
Good point. If I really dwell on it though, I think this could be one of those processes that was not developed to it's full potential until some years after the initial efforts. So the reaper was great, but the merging of tractor, reaper and fanning mill into the combine came later. The baler also had earlier stationary models. Could not tell you how far those go back. I have to concede the point on fertilizers but then how far would they get if we cannot get the crop off the field? It makes for some good discussions!
 
Dave H (MI)- It's a question of, Which came first...the chicken or the egg?

I feel that fertilizer induced the notion to invent better machinery due to the rise of crops produced by the introduction of the use of fertilizer. As the crops continued to increase in productivity, the need for greater/easier/cheaper harvesting was warranted.
 
(quoted from post at 15:31:08 09/13/14) Good point. If I really dwell on it though, I think this could be one of those processes that was not developed to it's full potential until some years after the initial efforts. So the reaper was great, but the merging of tractor, reaper and fanning mill into the combine came later. The baler also had earlier stationary models. Could not tell you how far those go back. I have to concede the point on fertilizers but then how far would they get if we cannot get the crop off the field? It makes for some good discussions!


Yea it came later, but well over 100 years ago.

Rick
 
Im going to go with the transportation system, roads, rail, water. Without the ability to get suplies to the farm and crops to market there would be no need for the rest.
 
Good question- got me to thinking. The first thing that came to mind after reading some of the replies was a book I read about the dust bowl-"The Worst, Hard Times", I think. I was surprised at how quickly mechanization spread, and we could produce more than we needed. Like wise I just finished a book about the Mississippi River. And being a New Yorker, I am somewhat familiar with the Erie Canal. Just like with production, as soon as we could, we were moving vast quantities of material all over.
I'm adding my vote to electricity, and all the things it made possible. Almost overnight we went to pumping water, cooling milk, heating, lighting, refrigerating/freezing produce, handling feed/grain/manure, fixing/building things with power tools/welders, fencing, and someone else could keep going.............
 
All of these are very interesting replies. this is not a "scientific" or an exact question. I asked this question to get everyone to think about how far we have come. I had not thought about transportation but I will have to consider that one.

I would have to say hydrolics. Think about land preparation. How big of a tillage tool, cultivator or planter you could use if you did not have hydrolics to lift them. This applies to 3pt lifts as well as SCV operated equipment. While I know some of this could be lifted using chains and cables, how limiting would that be?

>Look at your fertilizer. How is most of it applied? Spreader truck? While it COULD be chain driven most modern ones are hydrolic.

Chemicals. How is most of it applied? Either 3pt sprayer or pull behind with hydrolic fold booms.

Harvesting. Look at most combines. While most of it could be driven with belts, would that not severely limit the size in comparison to today's machines?

Thank You to everyone who contributed to this discussion!
 

Communism. it caused the failure of crops in many parts of the world, such as the grain failure in Russia. And the failure of sugar cane in Cuba. these crop failures caused the gains made by our scientists, inventors, industrialists, and farmers to all work together to make huge increases in production in order to enable us to become the worlds bread basket in just a few years. wheat and Soy beans to feed the Russians and Chinese, and corn to make the sugar that used to be imported from Cuba.
 
My vote is electricity, seconded by hydraulics. My reasoning is, electricity eliminated more work than hydraulics. GPS happened within these last 100 years. I think it might go on to be a bigger technology advancement. Just hasn't had enough time yet. We are going to see a time when machinery runs itself without a driver. Also, seed and fertilizer rates will all be regulated be GPS and satelite. Starting to see these things happen now.
 
I'll agree with Janicholson, the Haber Process for ammonia production. The beginnings of chemical fertilizer. Fritz Haber won the Nobel prize for that process. It was the only Nobel prize ever to be contested by the scientific community. Haber was a real piece of work... fascinating story.

All right, just a bit of it. He was a German Chemist and he invented zyklon B, which was a gas used to de-louse uniforms. Colourless and odourless, he had to put an odour in it so the workers could detect it. They used to park entire trains in tunnels, seal up the tunnels, then de-louse the entire train. You can imagine what ideas the German military got from that...

He also invented gas warfare, and lobbied very hard to get it approved for trials. He personally opened the valves for the first release at Ypres. Later, two successive gas blow-backs burned one German corporal's lungs so bad he could no longer run, so he was drummed out of the military... and went into politics.

Haber's Wife was so upset by these gas attacks that she confronted him, seized his service revolver and shot herself. Haber went to the Front the next day, leaving others to deal with her funeral.

Haber was a German patriot to the end of his days, and the ironic bit, he was also Jewish.

A fascinating story. But his Haber process, which was also used to make explosives, has been responsible for saving billions of people from starvation... Hence the Nobel Prize.

Troy
 
I agree on the Electricity, particularly in the area of Welding. Think how it would be if every repair to farm machinery had to be done on a Blacksmiths forge.

:>(
 
What everyone else said, LOL I am in the dairy end of it and I remember at a sale a guy pointed to a skid steer and said that is the reason for the big dairys! I can't say I would argue with him on that! Tom
 
Hy-Bred corn the rest followed. I remember going with my Dad over to Holdens here in Iowa and got the NEW seed corn in a bag before that corn was planted with big ears from previous crop shelled and planted. His remarks were that fall that the New corn would make the farmer more money than the tractor did because you got a good crop and the rest is history.
 
Cover crops, no till, and nutrient management.
We have all seen the effects of wind and water erosion.
 
My son indicates that inflatable tires were most important, allowing road travel. Jim
By the way I do not subscribe to Haber's politics at all. Jim
 
My vote would be the "combined" harvester/thresher or "combine" as we know it today. Just think of the labor and man hours required to cut a wheat field by hand, gather it, shock it to dry, gather it again., thresh it, clean it, move it to storage, dispose of the chaff and straw by using it for bedding whereby it's returned to the field by way of manure, finally making a full circle back to the field after being handled many many times.
The combine did all of this in one quick trip around the field and could be done by one man. This was all before rea electricity, hydraulics, computers, diesel engines, rubber tires etc.etc.
I think the combine allowed kids to leave the farm, allowed family members start businesses in town, allowed kids to attend high school and college, and allowed young men to fight world wars. What other advancement in agriculture can say that?
 
There are so many advancements that it's almost impossible to pinpoint a single one. Just to be different I'm going to say refrigeration. Before it became common most people had a limited supply of food. Since then there is an unlimited variety of food that can be stored. It also necessitated that more food was needed for more people and that meant that farming had to advance to keep up with the demand.

How's that for thinking outside the box.
 

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