Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Farming

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Over 10,000 years ago, humans began to cultivate and raise crops. Back then, a single farm could maybe grow enough food to feed a family and perhaps a little more. Today, a farmer in a developed country can grow enough food to feed hundreds of people.  The path from agriculture’s ancient roots to a modern mechanized farm wasn’t a straight line, and it relied on several major innovations throughout history. Learn more about the history of farming and the innovations that increased production on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over 10,000 years ago, humans began to cultivate and raise crops. Back then, a single farm could maybe grow enough food to feed a family and perhaps a little more. Today, a farmer in a developed country can grow enough food to feed hundreds of people. However, the path from agriculture's ancient roots to a modern mechanized farm was in a straight line, and it relied on multiple major innovations throughout history. Learn more about the history of farming and the innovations that increase production on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. In a previous episode, I talked about the origins of agriculture. I covered when and where we think agriculture was independently. developed around the world. In this episode, I want to talk about the innovations that over time resulted in changes and improvements in agricultural production. So to start, we have to have an idea of

what farming was like when it first began. The first farms were, as you can imagine, extremely simple affairs. Once people realized that they could use seeds to grow new plants, it was just a matter of getting seeds and throwing those seeds on the ground. And this was a pretty poor system for a host of reasons. The process of tossing seeds was something that was done for thousands of years, and it's known as broadcasting. This is a word you're probably familiar with as radio and television transmissions are called broadcasts. The modern term broadcasting actually gets its name from the farming technique. Broadcasting was nothing more than taking a handful of seeds and casting them in a broad arc. The problem with broadcasting is that the seeds weren't evenly distributed.

You'd have clumps of seeds in one part of the field and other parts had less. The second problem is that seeds don't do very well when they're just on the surface of the soil. They don't have access to the nutrients that lie just below the surface, and they're susceptible to being preyed on by birds and other animals. This phase of farming probably didn't last very long. Farmers quickly realized that their crops did better when they were planted in soil that was turned over, and this led to the development of the hoe. The hoe was a simple device which allowed farmers to turn over the soil by hand.

Turning over the soil had huge implications for farming, and it still practiced today, albeit in different ways. When soil is turned over, it allows nutrients that are below the surface to be raised to the surface. It errates the soil and breaks up the hard, compacted soil on the surface. It also buries weeds that are on the surface and makes it harder for them to grow. In addition, it allows dead plant matter and field residue to be plowed under the surface where they could decay faster, providing more nutrients. Hows were a breakthrough. In fact, some people placed hoe farming with the actual start of agriculture.

However, hoeing was extremely difficult work. Turning over an entire farm field by hand was backbreaking. Even using a hoe in a backyard garden can be very difficult. This led to the development of the Ard. An ard was a type of hoe that could be dragged. It's considered to be a forerunner of the plow. It was really nothing more than a stick that could be pulled along and cut through. the topsoil. Ards were initially pulled by people, and the earliest ards date back to the 8th

millennium BC. In Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, oxen were domesticated around 6,000 BC, and one of the biggest uses for these domesticated cattle was pulling ards across a field. Around 2,300 BC, iron ards began to appear in both Assyria and Egypt. Ards were certainly an improvement over hose, however, there were several weaknesses in the ox-pulled ard. One of the biggest innovations and the replacement of the ard was the creation of the plow. In particular, the single stick of the art was replaced with a board, which was known as a mold board. The mold board was able to not just cut a furrow in the soil, but actually turn over the soil. The mold board is believed to have been developed by the Romans, which is of note because there weren't many technical innovations that came out of either the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic.

However, plows were something that they were really good at. Celtic farmers took the Roman plow and added wheels to it, making it easier to pull. The Chinese independently developed the moldboard plow and also created the first moldboard plow that was made out of iron. Another major innervation was the move from oxen to horses. Oxen never stopped being used to pull plows. In fact, they're used in some parts of the world today. However, horses had more endurance than oxen. could work a longer day and plow more of a field. However, when horses were initially used,

they were hooked up to plows via a throat girth harness. These were basically a leash put around the neck of a horse. The throat girth harness was extremely inefficient. It would partially choke the horse preventing them from pulling at their maximum capacity. These sorts of harnesses were used throughout the ancient world, including China, Egypt, Greece, and Assyria. This was solved with the development of the horse collar. The first horse collars were developed sometime around the second to four century BC in China. The horse collar shifted the burden from the neck of the horse to its shoulders, which allowed a horse to pull more efficiently.

According to some 18th century experiments that were run, it was as much as three times more efficient. In addition to the plow, I should also note the development of the seed drill, which served a similar function as the plow or the ard. Seed drills allowed for the planting of seeds at a set depth. and they appeared independently in both Assyria and China. The other major innovation, of course, is the development of irrigation. First irrigation systems appeared around 8,000 years ago.

The story of irrigation is worth an episode of its own, but like turning over the soil, bringing water to crops was one of the very first things that early farmers figured out. Here the story of farming starts to take an odd turn. There was very little in the way of innovation in farming for centuries. The life of a farmer in the first century wasn't radically different than that of a farmer in the 16th century. There were some technical developments including horseshoes and iron plows. During the 14th century, there was a period known as the Arab Agricultural Revolution. Information about farming was shared across the entire Islamic world.

New crops and irrigation techniques were brought to places where they hadn't been done before. But it wasn't a radical introduction of new agricultural techniques. Likewise during the 16th century, the Colombian Exchange saw a host of new crops from the new world, which were transported to the old world. The beginning of modern agriculture, however, began in the 17th century with the British Agricultural Revolution. The British Agricultural Revolution took place alongside the Industrial Revolution, which happened parallel to it. The application of experimentation, invention, and the scientific method to agriculture defined the British Agricultural Revolution. There were multiple innovations that were popularized during this period. One of the major ones was the four-crop rotation system.

Crop rotation had been known to farmers for thousands of years. That was nothing new. The four-crop rotation system was popularized by Charles Townsend in the 17th century. It involves farmers replenishing the nutrients in the soil by rotating crops over four plots of land. The most common crops were wheat, turnips, barley, and clover. Barley served as fodder for animals, and clover was used for grazing land animals that would also fertilize the land while they were grazing on it. This system allowed for domesticated animals to be bred year-round. Selective breeding was also done analytically, starting in the 17th century, by Robert Bakewell.

While it had been done for centuries, selective breeding programs had never been systematically conducted before. He was able to breed sheep and cattle, including the first cattle that were bred to be raised as beef, not just working animals. In 1701, Jethro Tal perfected the seed drill. Versions of the seed drill have been used for centuries, but Tull's version was mechanized and allowed for the planting of seeds three rows at a time. And yes, this is the person that the rock band is named after. In 1786, the Scottish inventor Andrew Meekle invented the mechanical thresher, which could remove the outer husks from grains of wheat. In the 19th century, the pace of innovation accelerated, as mechanization increasingly found its way into farming. In 1826, Scottish inventor Reverend Patrick Bell developed a

reaping machine using a scissor-type device to cut crops at their base, and this is basically the same type of system that's still in use today. In 1835, American inventor Hiram Moore built and patented the first combine harvester. A combine harvester, also simply known as a combine, is a machine that combines four different processes used during harvesting into one, reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing. Combines were a massive labor-saving device, and they're still used today in the harvesting of most agricultural crops, including wheat, barley, rice, corn, soy, oats, and many more. In 1837, an American blacksmith by the name of John Deere developed a steel plow that allowed soil not to stick to the plow blade, which was a huge problem that farmers faced with soil in the

Midwest. In 1843, Australian John Ridley developed a stripper that would cut only the heads off of crops, leaving the rest of the plant in the field to be plowed back into the soil. Chemistry also played a large part in improving agricultural outputs. The 19th century saw the first artificial fertilizers such as ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate. The thing that really drove the industrial revolution was the steam engine, and there were attempts as early as 1812 to adopt steam engines for farming, but the technology wasn't easily transferred. Farms were more remote and only tended to need the power a few weeks a year, not continuously like a factory. Moreover, they weren't very portable, which would be necessary if they were to be used in the field.

This changed in 1859 when the British inventor Thomas Aveling modified a smaller portable steam engine to be self-propelled. These were known as traction engines, and it's where the modern English word, tractor, comes from. Steam tractors were used for plowing in the second half of the 19th century, but they were far from universally adopted. In most cases, it was still more efficient to use horses because traction engines were so heavy. In the 1890s, the internal combustion engine made tractors more practical. In 1889, John Carter in Illinois built the first gasoline-powered tractor. However, the big breakthrough in tractors came in 1902 when English inventor Dan Albone manufactured what he dubbed the Ival Agricultural Motor, a cheap internal combustion engine tractor that sold for 300 pounds.

Over 500 of the tractors were built and shipped around the world. At first, these tractors didn't catch on. The person who really made tractors take off in popularity was Henry Ford, who developed the Fordson tractor and first sold it in 1917. The Fortson was able to take advantage of the mass production techniques used by the Ford Motor Company, and by 1923, the Fortson had a 73% share of the market. Chemistry certainly didn't disappear from farming in the 20th century either. In 1910, the Hobber-Bosch process, which I covered in a previous episode, allowed for the creation of fertilizers from nitrogen in the atmosphere. One problem that had plagued farmers for thousands of years, literally, was insects eating their crops.

Pesticides developed from natural sources began seeing use in the 19th century, and arsenic-based pesticides were popular in the first half of the 20th century. Swiss chemist Paul Mueller discovered the insecticidal properties of a chemical known as DDT, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948. DDT was put to wide use starting in the 1950s. DDT was eventually banned, but pesticides have become ubiquitous in agriculture, as have chemicals such as herbicides to control weeds and fungicides to prevent fungal infections. As the genome was unlocked, companies began to genetically engineer crops and increased production

to make them more adaptable for certain climates and soils. One of the most recent advancements in farming is the adaptation of information technology to allow for precision farming. Satellite imagery can determine exactly which parts of a field require fertilizing or require pesticides. GPS guided tractors can be driven almost automatically, reducing the amount of labor required to work a field. All of these more recent developments are worthy of their own future episodes. Today, the world produces more food than ever before, and many farms around the world still do not have the advantages of modern mechanized farm machines. And this means that there

are still increases in productivity to be found from just spreading current technologies to places that haven't adopted them. A modern farm in a developed country is a very high-tech affair, possibly involving computers, GPS systems, and expensive machinery. And this is all a far cry from its beginnings of people throwing some seeds on the ground and hoping for the best. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer.

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