ABSTRACT
There have been numerous consequential innovations since agriculture’s inception: advances in irrigation in the valleys of Mesopotamia and the Nile 3000-5000 Before Present (BP); the development of aquatic rice-growing in the valleys and deltas throughout Asia between 2000 and 3000 BP; and the emergence of cultivation agriculture based on animal-drawn plows, which emerged between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries in Europe. One of the more consequential innovations over the last 200 years was the substitution of capital for labor – what is often referred to as the “mechanical revolution” in agriculture. Examples include: the cotton gin in 1793, which separated the cotton lint from the seed (and initially greatly increased the demand for slave labor in US southern slave states); the threshing machine in 1816, which separated grain from the stalk; the John Deere steel plow in 1837, which turned the soil cleanly thereby minimizing drag that bogged down earlier plows; and Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1834, which cut grain. Later in the nineteenth century came the tractor, which, unlike the horses it replaced, did not require food, water, or sleep, and allowed the land used previously to raise hay and oats to feed one’s horses to be used to produce still more commodities.
