The introduction of tractors has changed the face of agriculture.
While mechanization has changed the face of cities, the change it has made to the countryside is equally as dramatic. The introduction of mechanized agriculture led to vast growth in cultivated land as well as a movement of population from rural to urban areas. The beginning of the 20th century saw an explosion of this mechanization in the USA.
Tractors
The first gasoline driven tractor sold commercially in 1902 and tractor sales increased steadily over the first decade of the 20th century, though not really exploding until the next decades. Initally these were huge machines weighing tens of thousands of pounds, though manufacturers such as International Harvester were quick to modify the designs to reduce the weight and expense.
These machines ploughed, mowed and reaped, though weight and low ground clearance meant that they could not be used effectively for crops such as cotton and corn; two of the principle crops of the era.
Stationary Engines
Before farms used tractors widely they began using large numbers of stationary gasoline-powered engines. These engines were stationary, in the sense that they did not produce locomotive power, but were often portable so that they move from place to place and work in a variety of tasks. Gasoline engines were for many things, mainly for threshing corn, churning butter, cutting wood and bailing hay. Often the existing, manual, animal or steam engine powered machinery would join to the new stationary engine. As a belt, linked to whatever power source the farm employed, already drove the machines, the adaption was not difficult.
Steam Threshing
For a short period at the beginning of the 20th century agricultural workers did the threshing, that is the separation of grain from the stalks and husks by mechanical means, using large, steam powered engines. Prior to this workers carried out this task using animal or human driven treadmills and later in the century using gas-powered tractors.
In the two later cases workers farmers used the equipment they purchased to process only the grain which they produced on their own farms. However, the large steam threshing rigs which came onto the market at the beginning of the 20th century were so expensive that large groups of farmers bought them and then moved them from farm to farm, using the collective labor of all the farmers at once.
This is a rare example of new technology facilitating rather destroying cooperative practices. However, at points the demand for labor created by the steam powered threshers was so high that workers were forcibly conscripted.
Peanut Production
In the late 19th and early 20th century in the American South, farmers under pressure from financiers intensively farmed and mono-cropped cotton. By the 1900s this practice had radically depleted the soil. In search of an alternative cash crop suitable for the southern farmlands, George Washington Carver performed pioneering work on the cultivation and uses of peanuts. In response, manufacturers developed a number of machines for the planting, harvesting and processing of peanuts which took off in the first decade of the 20th century.
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