For many decades, agricultural farming relied on the farmer's own physical strength and endurance along with assistance of horses and/or mules and oxen. As the Industrial Revolution spread across Europe and America in the period between 1760 and 1840, entrepreneurial farmers looked at ways that farming activities could be mechanized.
As noted in the foregoing, crop farming involved three basic processes: sowing, reaping and processing. Regardless of the time period, whether during the Colonial Period in American History, the Medieval Ages, ancient Sumer or the present day, those three basic processes made up crop farming: agriculture. Evidence of modernization can be seen in the development of the tools that farmers have used to perform those three basic processes.
The English agriculturist, Jethro Tull was previously noted for the invention of the seed drill. Evidence of the earlier mechanical sowing of seeds by the ancient Sumerians suggests that Tull was improving on an earlier idea. The Chinese are believed to have used multi-tube seed drills as early as the 2nd Century B.C. The Sumerian and Chinese tools did not spread to Europe at the time, and so it was not until a seed drill was invented in 1602 by Tadeo Cavalina in Bologna, Italy that Europeans knew of the tool. In any case, when Tull introduced his seed drill in 1701, he introduced a way for seeds to be uniformly spread and sown into the ground. The seed drill was constructed with a series of runners spaced as far apart as the ploughed furrows. The runners held the assemblies called 'drills.' The leading edge of each drill opened a furrow to a uniform depth. Behind each drill, a seed was dropped into the furrow which was now at the same uniform depth as the furrows beside it. Following behind the drill were metal discs which pushed the sides of the furrows back over the seeds.
George Washington realized the benefits of the mechanical seed drill and expressed such in a letter written to Anthony Whiting on the 30th of December 1792:
Speaking of Sowing Clover, let me request that such a machine as it described in Mr. Bordleys pamphlet, be prepared, and the clover Seed sown therewith. My Clover Seed has never been regularly, or well sown, notwithstanding it has been lavished upon the ground; some parts of which having none, and other parts surcharged.
Seed drills of the design introduced by Jethro Tull, which were small and light-weight enough to be drawn by a single horse, were employed by farmers into the 1930s.
At the present day, farmers used a variation of the seed drill called a planter.
In 1826, the Scottish inventor Patrick Bell designed a reaper machine which employed a scissors mechanism to cut plants as it passed over them. It was pushed by horses and apparently worked as intended, but Bell did not patent the invention. That first invention probably only cut, or reaped, the crop. Being considered a reaping machine, Bell's invention would have had to have been followed by workers who gathered the shorn crops and then carried them to the barn for threshing. Hiram Moore, in 1835 in the United States, built and patented the first combine harvester. The word 'combine' was used to describe the machine that Moore built primarily because it combined reaping, threshing and winnowing all in one machine at the same time. From that point, the threshing machines were known variously as 'combines' or 'harvesters.' The first harvesters were not self-propelled; they were pulled by horse, mule or oxen. Twenty or more horses were required to pull the giant sized machines. Moore's machine had a cut width of fifteen feet.
Three-quarters of a century passed before any changes or improvements were made to the combine harvester. A self-propelled harvester was produced in California by the Holt Manufacturing Company in 1911. Four years later, in 1915, the International Harvester Company began to manufacture horse-pulled combine harvesters. Through the 1920s, the Case Corporation and John Deere began to construct combines pulled by a separate tractor. The combines bore their own small engines to operate their working parts. The Sunshine WT Auto Header was produced in Australia in 1923. It was the first center-feed self-propelled harvester and was in production until 1936. The WT model was superseded by the KT model in 1937, which was in production until 1946. The name 'auto header' referred to the fact that they were auto-propelled and they cut the 'heads' of the grain. They were constructed with three forward and three reverse gears and achieved a speed of up to three miles per hour. The harvesters built by Sunshine were built by H. V. McKay Proprietary Ltd., and exported around the world. In 1930, the Massey-Harris company of Canada purchased a stake in the McKay company. In 1937, Massey-Harris fine-tuned the self-propelled harvester and three years later produced a model that weighed much lighter than the original Sunshine Auto-Header. In 1947, an auger was invented by Lyle Yost to lift grain out of a combine, thereby making that process easier.
Nearly three decades passed before any major changes were made to the harvester. In 1975, Sperry-New Holland introduced the 'twin-rotor' combine. Up to that point, the combine stripped the grain off of the stalks by passing them between a series of horizontal rasp bars mounted on the outside of a quarter cylinder. Moving rub bars would pull the crop through concave grates and against the rasp bars. The grain would essentially be squeezed, or rubbed, off of the stalks, most of which were left over and could be baled and used as livestock bedding hay. The rotary model passed the stalks along a helical rotor or twin rotors and the grain was stripped off the stalks. Much of the stalks themselves were ripped up in the process. Some farmers objected to the rotary models because they found that the way that the stalks were damaged made baling difficult.
In the 1980s, with the emergence of personal computers and computer technology, on-board electronics were introduced into combine harvesters. Threshing efficiency could now be measured more accurately.
Modernization also came to dairy farming in the form of the progression from hand milking to mechanical milking machines to the use of automatic cow milking machines that don't even require a human to operate.
The earliest attempts to make the process easier (not necessarily on the cow, but on the farmer) came about in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
The first 'improvement' on hand milking was 'catheter milking.' Wooden, feather quills, or specially crafted metal tubes were inserted into the teats in order to keep the sphincter muscle open. The catheter was attached to a rubber tube through which the milk flowed into a bucket. This form of milking was discouraged because of the infection and injury to the cow that it caused.
The English firm of Hodges and Brockenden patented a vacuum milking machine in 1851. It consisted of a gutta percha cup that fit over the entire udder. Gutta percha was a rigid latex derived from the palaquium tree of Malaysia. The cup was attached to a hand crank that was turned to produce suction and a vacuum. A hose ran from the bottom of the cup to a collection pail.
Other early milking machines consisted of tubes connected to tin teat cups with elastic flanges that had been invented by John Kingman of New Hampshire in 1859. In 1860, L. O. Colvin patented a vacuum milking machine that used the cups invented by Kingman. In some of these milking machines, rollers built into the teat cups were intended to replicate the actions of the farmer's fingers to extract the milk from the cow's teats.
A milking machine was invented in 1878 by Anna Baldwin, a farm wife from New Jersey. It operated by suction similar to the Colvin machines. Baldwin patented her invention but it was not widely received. Gustaf de Laval, a Swedish engineer, produced his own version of a suction milking machine in 1892. The first practical example of de Laval's milking machine was marketed in 1918, five years after his death.
Initially, the milking machine sat on top of a standard milk pail. Later models, known as hanging milkers, were suspended under the cow. A wide leather strap, called a surcingle, was hung over the cow's lower back. The milking device and collection pail were suspended from the strap underneath the cow. The hanging milker allowed the cow to move around during the milking process.
Farmers in general did not trust the safety of the machines, either for the cow or for their families. It was believed that the mechanical and vacuum machines would contribute to the spread of disease. Those fears contributed to the continuation of hand milking into the Twentieth Century.
The next advance that was made in the mechanical methods of milking came with the invention of the 'milk pipeline.' A milk pipeline was a system of metal piping into which the milk was pulled by vacuum. The vacuum extracted the milk from each cow's teats, and it was sucked into the milk pipeline. There was no longer a need to connect a milk collection pail to each cow. Multiple cows could be milked at the same time, permitting greater yield in the same amount of time. A major benefit to the farmer was that the physical stress in carrying many pails of milk from cow to storage was greatly reduced. The barns equipped with milk pipelines and accommodating numerous cows at the same time were called 'milk parlors.' The milk that was vacuumed into the milk pipeline was emptied into a single storage tank.
Milk parlors have been laid out in a number of patterns, two of which are the parallel and rotary layouts. In a parallel parlor, a number of cows are guided into the milk parlor and lined up in a row. The farmer to do the milking, the 'milker,' moves down the row, cleaning the cows' teats and attaching cups that are connected to the pipeline one after another onto the cows. After the cows are milked, the milker moves down the row, massaging the back of the udder to relieve and milk that has not been extracted and removing the cups. The cows in the row are then led out to pasture. In a rotary parlor, the cows are guided into the parlor and loaded one at a time into individual stalls of a revolving platform. As they are loaded, the milker attaches the cups that are connected to the pipeline. By the time that all of the stalls are filled, the milking of the first cows loaded should be completed. The cups are removed and the cows are backed out of the stalls and returned to the pasture.
Advances have been made in recent years for the safety of the cows. One of the advances was the invention of the automatic milker take-off system. If a cow is over-milked, meaning that milking is continued after the bladder has been emptied, damage to the tissues is possible. The automatic take-off system can be set to shut off when the milk flow reaches a pre-set level.
The most recent developments in dairy farming were developed in the 1970s and have been commercially available since the 1990s. Known as 'automatic milking' or 'voluntary milking,' the systems are designed to function entirely without any human intervention. Most AMS (automatic milking systems) consist of a milking machine, a teat position sensor, and a robotic arm for automatic teat-cup application and removal. Most of the systems also include a gate control system for entry to and exit from the AMS.
The benefit of the AMS is that each cow can determine for itself when to be milked. When any particular cow enters the unit (enticed by feed), an ID sensor reads a tag on the cow. The last time that the cow was milked is identified by the system. If it has been recent, the gate system opens and the cow is encouraged to leave the unit without being milked again. If an adequate amount of time has passed since the cow was last milked, the robotic arm attaches the teat cups to the cow and the milking is performed.
Despite the non-farmer's assumption that farmers are 'country bumpkins' and 'behind the times', most of them have kept up with technological advances over the years and use those advances to make their lives less difficult.
