AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY IN THE U.S.A

From the founding of Virginia in 1607 until the late 1890s agriculture played a predominant economic role in the United States. The early settlers adopted the Native American practices of growing corn, squash, and tobacco. Initially corn was the primary food crop, while tobacco was exported to earn foreign exchange. In New England most farmers raised multiple food crops as well as livestock, producing enough for their family needs with some surplus goods for sale.
Agriculture in the South became more specialized and commercialized than in the North. By the late seventeenth century tobacco, rice, and indigo became major commercial crops. Production expanded rapidly in conjunction with the plantation system that utilized the labor of African American slaves. Cotton became an important commercial crop with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 by Eli Whitney (1765–1825).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century significant changes occurred in the farming sector of the economy. Tens of thousands of settlers migrated west to settle in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys between the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the American Civil War (1861–1865). This produced the vast productive potential of grain and livestock farmers. By 1860 the United States had 2,044,077 farms. The U.S. government actively supported the farming community by promoting liberal public land policies, developing canal and rail transportation and reallocating choice farmland from Native Americans to prospective settlers.
Prior to the American Civil War the introduction of animal power and labor-saving machinery provided one of the greatest advances in agricultural history. Innovations such as iron plows, threshing machines, grain drills, and cultivators became common. The McCormick agricultural equipment company in Chicago led the mechanization of farming. In 1800 it took approximately 56 man-hours to plant and harvest one acre of wheat. By 1840, with mechanization the same acre of wheat took only 35 man-hours to achieve the same result.
Agriculture became the engine behind the U.S. economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1860 the two million farms in the United States produced 838 million bushels of corn, 172 million bushels of wheat, 5.4 million bales of cotton, and millions of pounds of tobacco. Increasingly farmers began to sell their produce to purchase manufactured goods. In 1860 farm products comprised 82 percent of U.S. exports. This helped support the foreign exchange used for investment in U.S. manufacturing and transportation.

IN 1800 IT TOOK APPROXIMATELY 56 MANHOURS TO PLANT AND HARVEST ONE ACRE OF WHEAT. BY 1840, WITH MECHANIZATION THE SAME ACRE OF WHEAT TOOK ONLY 35 MAN-HOURS TO ACHIEVE THE SAME RESULT.

Following the American Civil War agricultural expansion accelerated at an even higher rate with the migration of farmers to the Great Plains. Further, with the end of slavery, African American sharecroppers worked on hundreds of thousands of small farms in the South. Between 1860 and 1916 the number of farms grew from two million to 6.4 million. Farm acreage doubled from 407 million to 879 million acres.

With the increased acreage and the introduction of better machinery, the production of commercial crops continued to increase tremendously. The great deflationary crisis of the last third of the nineteenth century stemmed from precisely this ‘‘crisis of over-production’’ in agriculture. Productivity on the farm had outstripped the market demand for farm produce. From about 1873 to the end of the century, this glutted farm commodity market became a drag on the rest of the economy. It also produced a strong protest movement in the Farmers’ Alliance movements and the Populist challenge.
Farmers did not always know what lay behind their distress. At different points they blamed the railroads, the elevator (crop storage facilities) companies, and the bankers. But they eventually focused on the need for ‘‘parity,’’ a government subsidy for a fair return on their outlay of labor and capital.
By World War I (1914–1918) the agricultural landscape of the United States settled into regional patterns. Farmers in the Northeast focused on dairy, poultry, and fruits and vegetables for the urban market. In the Midwest grain crops such as wheat, corn, and barley supported a thriving cattle and hog business. The region of the Great Plains from Texas to the Canadian border became known as the nation’s breadbasket, with wheat being the primary commercial crop.
Agriculture in the Rocky Mountain States focused on cattle and sheep raising, while most of the crops in the Far West depended on irrigation. In the South cotton continued to be the main cash crop until after World War II (1939–1945).
After World War I the overproduction crisis continued to trouble American agriculture, with farm prices generally in decline. None of the measures taken by the U.S. Government solved the problem of low returns to farmers. However in 1933, during the Great Depression, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which introduced a wide range of federal programs to help the farmer.
These programs—which involved paying farmers to leave their land fallow in order to create a shortage in farm commodities and an upturn in prices—continued throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Government payments to farmers in 1934 totaled $134 million; by 1961 payments increased to $1.5 billion and by 1987 to $22 billion.
In the 1930s agriculture underwent significant changes due to the advancements in technology and the introduction of science to farming. The use of the gasoline tractor ended the horse age of farming shortly after World War II. The continued development of better machinery made the farming industry less laborintensive.
The contribution from science included the growing use of chemicals for fertilizers and insecticides, and the breeding of hybrid strains producing better crops and healthier livestock. These and other developments increased the nation’s agricultural productivity without a proportionate increase in acreage.

The amount of farmland in use remained constant at about 1 billion acres between 1930 and 1980. However crop production increased dramatically. For example, corn production increased from 20 bushels an acre in 1930 to about 110 bushels half a century later. In 1980 one-third of farm production was sold overseas and agricultural exports made up about 20 percent of the nation’s foreign sales.
By the end of the twentieth century, new trends emerged in agriculture. These include organic farming and the reduced use of chemicals in response to health and environmental issues. Crop and livestock production has also changed as farmers made increased use of biotechnology and genetic engineering. Farmers continue to have increased capabilities to cultivate more land and handle more livestock with less labor.
This resulted in a sharp increase in the average size of farms and a rapid decline in the number of farmers. In 1940 there were 6.1 million farms averaging 215 acres in size. By 1980 only 2.4 million farms remained, averaging 431 acres. In spite of this trend over 90 percent of farms in the United States continue to be operated by families rather than agricultural corporations.
Throughout U.S. history farming was an important economic activity. By the end of the twentieth century it became a business that required skilled labor, capital, and good management. In addition, most people in the United States had little direct contact or involvement with this industry. By the 1980s the number of people living on farms had declined to less than 2.5 percent of the population. Agriculture had shifted from a simple commercial venture to a specialized business.

AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT 

The mechanization of agricultural equipment in the mid-nineteenth century began a period of rapid change and advancement for the agricultural industry. Mechanization made the processes of planting and harvesting quicker and reduced the industry’s reliance on manual labor. Until mechanization began in the 1850s, farmers used hand tools made of wood or iron. The industrial revolution and the modernization of equipment sometimes brought rebellions by rural workers who feared machines would eliminate their jobs.
These fears were not completely unfounded. By using machine work in place of many tasks traditionally done by laborers, mechanized equipment did lessen the agricultural industry’s dependence on manual labor. In 1850, the first threshing machines were created independently by Cyrus McCormick (1809–1884) in the United States and Patrick Bell in Scotland. Plow improvements enabled farmers to work easily in different types of soil, while technological advances mechanized the planting and measurement of corn. An early breakthrough came in the 1850s, in Galesburg, Illinois, when George W. Brown developed the first semimechanized method of corn planting using a horsedrawn machine that manually dropped seed. These first innovations stimulated further inventions. For example, ‘‘furrow openers’’ or shoes were placed on the front of the vehicle to prepare the soil. Seed-dropping became more refined, which allowed the vehicle operator to pay closer attention to where the corn was placed.
Hay rakes, hay-loaders, harvesting machines, and milking machines also appeared at about this time.
Steam power, which came to be used on farms in the 1860s, made mechanized equipment a vital part of the farming industry. It rapidly turned the curve of development upward by expanding into so many areas of farming technology that in 1860 the U.S. Patent Office issued hundreds of new patents. Among these were patents for harvesters, shellers, huskers, cultivators, and cob crushers for corn, as well as smut machines and seed drills. When the first gasoline-powered tractor was built in 1901, most American farmers could not afford it, but in 1917 automobile entrepreneur Henry Ford offered his Fordson tractor for $397, a price that made the product much more accessible to farmers.
Seven years later International Harvester introduced its versatile Farmall tractor with removable attachments. One such attachment was the cultivator, which could penetrate the soil at different depths. Other attachments included rotary hoes that could chop up weeds, and spraying devices that could spray in circles of up to 100 feet. Gasoline-driven tractors came into wider use during the 1920s and 1930s, increasingly replacing the horse for farm labor. Between 1940 and 1960, five million tractors replaced an estimated twelve million horses.
The era of the western and southern farmer coincided with the era of the railroad, as it was the rail system during the second half of the nineteenth century that allowed the farmer to get his crop to market. Advancements in the transportation industry in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on agriculture. The truck and the airplane both significantly contributed to the production and transportation of farm products. After they first appeared on farms between 1913 and 1920, trucks changed the marketing and production patterns of farm products.
Their importance to harvesting the fields was paramount because they could haul items such as fertilizer, feed, crops, and livestock. Later on, the development of portable refrigeration units allowed trains and trucks to carry freshly slaughtered meat to market. Trucks also carried pigs to centralized meatpacking centers in the cities.
Farmers found many uses for the airplane in farm work. In the early twentieth century, one of the first uses for the airplane was to scatter poison dust over cotton fields infected by the pink mollworm. Other early tasks included dusting against disease and insects, spreading fertilizer, transporting breeding livestock, and dropping bales of hay to livestock stranded in snowstorms. The use of the truck and the airplane helped alleviate many problems faced by agricultural workers, such as crop failure due to disease or insects.
At the same time improvements in steam power and gasoline-driven vehicles continued. The versatile Farmall tractor in the early 1900s replaced the steam driven reaping and threshing machine that was first introduced in the 1880s. Despite wide use of the Allis Chalmers’ All-Crop Harvester as early as 1936, however, crop harvester advancements were delayed because of World War II (1939–1945).

The All-Crop was a diesel-driven combine with a capacity for massharvesting, but consumers still preferred the more affordable picker-sheller machines, which were more affordable if less advanced. The use of silos and improved storage methods eventually gave the All-Crop Harvester an unbeatable advantage in the farm implement market.
The advancements in agricultural equipment slowed in the latter half of the twentieth century and some of the industry’s old standbys began to weaken. During the 1980s, American farmers bought about 50,000 large tractors, but by the 1990s only a little over 20,000 were purchased. Combine harvesters also began to lose their appeal. Only 130,000 were sold during the 1980s compared to 300,000 in the 1970s. This trend continued into the 1990s.
Showroom viewing of new farm equipment became less popular, creating a swollen inventory in early 1991. Farmers were also subject to a variety of short-term hazards like the old problem of excess yields, which caused prices to drop. Also, high interest rates brought many farm bankruptcies in 1991.

Tied to the always shaky farming sector, the economic highs and lows of the agricultural equipment market also continued to affect employment in the farm implement industry. In the early 1990s tractor and industrial truck manufacturing was concentrated in 139 factories in the five-state region of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. The manufacturing of farm machinery generated large revenues and employed a substantial number of people. In 1993 Deere & Company, a leader in the industry, employed 36,500 and had sales of $7 billion. Another industry leader, J.I. Case, employed 7,000 and generated sales of $3.7 billion.

From 'Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History', Thomas Carson (editor), The Gale Group, Farmington Hills, MI U.S.A, 1999, p.14-17 v.1. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.