How did mechanized farming help transform the US from a farming nation to an industrial one?

Answer:

In the early 1900s, more than half of Americans were either farmers or lived in rural communities.1 Most U.S. farms were diversified, meaning they produced a variety of crops and animal species together on the same farm, in complementary ways.2 Farmers were skilled in a wide range of trades and had autonomy over how to manage their crops and animals. Animals were typically raised with access to the outdoors. Most of the work on the farm was done by human or animal labor.

Although conditions like these still exist, the industrialization of agriculture radically transformed how the vast majority of food is produced in the U.S. and many other parts of the world. Over the brief span of the 20th century, agriculture underwent greater change than it had since it was first adopted some 13,000 years ago. Modern U.S. agriculture has been described as “the most efficient in the world, at least in terms of the dollar and cent costs of production.”1 The public health and ecological costs of industrialization, however, are not reflected in the prices of food.

SPECIALIZATION

wheat harvest

cigar workers

Specialization aims to increase efficiency by narrowing the range of tasks and roles involved in production. A diversified farmer, for example, might need to manage and care for many different vegetable crops, a composting operation, a flock of egg-laying hens, a sow, and her litter of piglets. Specialized farmers, by contrast, can focus all their knowledge, skills, and equipment on one or two enterprises, such as growing corn and soy, or fattening beef cattle. Over the course of industrialization, specialization was applied to nearly all facets of food production.

Diversified farms gave way to genetically uniform monocultures—fields planted with just one crop species at a time, such as corn, wheat, or soy, over a very large area. Meat, milk, and egg production became largely separated from crop production and involved facilities that housed a single breed of animal, during a particular period of its lifespan, for a single purpose (e.g., breeding, feeding, or slaughter). Farmers, once skilled in a breadth of trades, fell into more specialized roles.

Specialization was also applied to animal genetics, as selective breeding produced animals designed for a single outcome—large breast meat, for example, or increased milk production. Compared to chickens of the 1930s, today’s chickens bred for meat (“broilers”) grow to almost twice the weight, in less than half the time, using less than half as much feed.5 Genetic selection for these exaggerated traits has often come at the expense of the animals’ health, including increased risks for heart failure in broilers and udder infections in dairy cows bred for higher milk production.6

MECHANIZATION

wheat harvest

Threshing

Like work on an assembly line, specialized labor often involves repetitive tasks that can be performed by machines. This meant routine jobs like sowing seeds, harvesting crops, milking cows, and feeding and slaughtering animals could be mechanized, reducing (and in some cases eliminating) the need for human and animal labor. Between 1900 and 2000, the share of the U.S. workforce involved in agriculture declined from 41 percent to 2 percent.7

In some cases, mechanization brought tremendous gains in efficiency. Grain and bean crops, such as corn, wheat, rice, and soy, must be cut from the fields (reaped) and removed from the inedible parts of the plant (threshed). Doing this by hand involves an enormous amount of time and effort. By hand, a person can thresh roughly 15 to 40 kg of grain per hour, usually by beating the harvested crop against a hard surface to shake the grain loose from the inedible chaff that surrounds it. In the same amount of time, a mechanized thresher can process 450 to 600 kg of rice, sorghum, or beans, or 1,500 to 2,000 kg of corn.8

CHEMICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL INPUTS

graph

pesticide

The early 1900s saw the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, innovations that have become a hallmark of industrial crop production. In just 12 years, between 1964 and 1976, synthetic and mineral fertilizer applications on U.S. crops nearly doubled, while pesticide use on major U.S. crops increased by 143 percent.10 The shift to specialized monocultures increased farmers’ reliance on these chemicals, in part because crop diversity can help suppress weeds and other pests.11,12

Chemical and pharmaceutical use also became commonplace in newly industrialized models of meat, milk, and egg production. Antibiotics, for example, were introduced to swine, poultry, and cattle feed after a series of experiments in the 1940s and 1950s found that feeding the drugs to animals caused them to gain weight faster and on less feed.13 By 2009, 80 percent of the antibiotic drugs sold in the U.S. were used not for human medicine but for

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