Farmers and ranchers

Mechanical reaper and steel plow

Cyrus McCormick tested his horse-drawn reaper in Virginia in 1831, and after his patent lapsed rival makers multiplied, more than a hundred of them by 1850. With a reaper, grain could be cut when it was ready, in less time and with less labor. John Deere's plow, made in his Grand Detour, Illinois blacksmith shop by 1838, scoured clean in the sticky prairie soil that clogged older plows. Together they let one farm family work far more land, and they pulled farming west onto the prairie.

Land-grant colleges, homesteads and public farm research

In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Act, which funded state colleges to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts, and the Homestead Act, which offered surveyed public land free to families who would live on and farm it. The Hatch Act of 1887 and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 further expanded the public role in agricultural research. Running a farm began to draw on public science and schooling, not only on what a family had learned for itself.

Gasoline tractor replaces horses and mules

The Fordson, introduced in 1917, quickly became the most popular tractor in America. By 1960 they had millions of tractors and 3 million work animals. The 1954 Census of Agriculture found millions of horses and mules had left farms in just four years. USDA concludes that tractors had essentially replaced animal power by 1970, and with it went much of the hired and family labor that animal farming needed.

Hybrid seed, chemical fertilizer and pesticides

The first company to produce hybrid corn seed commercially was organized in 1926, and production took off in the early 1930s. By 1960, nearly all of US corn acres were planted with hybrid seed, which farmers had to buy fresh each year. Cheap chemical fertilizers and pesticides spread after 1945.

GPS guidance, precision agriculture and genetically engineered seed

Genetically engineered seed for major field crops went on sale in 1996, and today most of US corn, upland cotton and soybeans are grown from GE varieties. In the same years farmers adopted yield maps, variable-rate application and GPS guidance, which began with lightbars in the mid-1990s.

Farm data platforms, smartphones, autonomy and AI

Running a farm has become a data job as well as a field job. Telematics and software now handle routine farm record keeping, and guidance and section control already automate much of the steering. USDA cautions that AI and machine learning have not yet been deployed at scale on farms, so their effect on the work is still unproven.