Mechanised agriculture is the process of using agricultural machinery to mechanise the work of agriculture , greatly increasing farm worker productivity. In modern times, powered machinery has replaced many farm jobs formerly carried out by manual labour or by working animals such as oxen , horses and mules.

Mechanised agriculture

The entire history of agriculture contains many examples of the use of tools, such as the hoe and the plough. But the ongoing integration of machines since the Industrial Revolution has allowed farming to become much less labour-intensive. Current mechanised agriculture includes the use of tractors , trucks , combine harvesters , countless types of farm implements , aeroplanes and helicopters for aerial application , and other vehicles. Precision agriculture even uses computers in conjunction with satellite imagery and satellite navigation GPS guidance to increase yields.

Mechanisation was one of the large factors responsible for urbanisation and industrial economies. Besides improving production efficiency, mechanisation encourages large scale production and sometimes can improve the quality of farm produce. On the other hand, it can displace unskilled farm labour and can cause environmental degradation such as pollution , deforestation , and soil erosion , especially if it is applied shortsightedly rather than holistically.

Jethro Tull 's seed drill ca. It was an important factor in the British Agricultural Revolution. Since the beginning of agriculture threshing was done by hand with a flail , requiring a great deal of labour. The threshing machine , which was invented in but not widely used for several more decades, simplified the operation and allowed the use of animal power. Before the invention of the grain cradle ca.

It was estimated that for each of Cyrus McCormick's horse-pulled reapers ca. By two men and two horses could cut, rake and bind 20 acres of wheat per day.

In the s the reaper and threshing machine were combined into the combine harvester. These machines required large teams of horses or mules to pull. Steam power was applied to threshing machines in the late 19th century. There were steam engines that moved around on wheels under their own power for supplying temporary power to stationary threshing machines. These were called road engines, and Henry Ford seeing one as a boy was inspired to build an automobile. With internal combustion came the first modern tractors in the early s, becoming more popular after the Fordson tractor ca.

At first reapers and combine harvesters were pulled by teams of horses or tractors, but in the s self powered combines were developed. Advertising for motorised equipment in farm journals during this era did its best to compete against horse-drawn methods with economic arguments, extolling common themes such as that a tractor "eats only when it works", that one tractor could replace many horses, and that mechanisation could allow one man to get more work done per day than he ever had before.

The horse population in the US began to decline in the s after the conversion of agriculture and transportation to internal combustion. Peak tractor sales in the US were around Although farmers of corn, wheat, soy, and other commodity crops had replaced most of their workers with harvesting machines and combines by the s enabling them to efficiently cut and gather grains, growers of produce continued to rely on human pickers to avoid the bruising of the product in order to maintain the blemish-free appearance demanded of consumers.

As the number of illegal workers has continued to decline since reaching its peak in due to increased border patrols and an improving Mexican economy, the industry is increasing the use of mechanisation. Mechanization of Maine's blueberry industry has reduced the number of migrant workers required from 5, in to 1, in even though production has increased from million pounds per year in to 90 million pounds in As of , prototype chili pepper harvesters are being tested by New Mexico State University.

The New Mexico green chile crop is currently hand-picked entirely by field workers [13] as chili pods tend to bruise easily. The equipment is expected to increase yield per acre and help to offset a sharp decline in acreage planted due to the lack of available labour and drought conditions. Mechanization has progressed slowly due to the uncertainty of future economic benefits due to competition from Brazil and the transitory damage to orange trees when they are harvested. There has been an ongoing transition to mechanical harvesting of cling peaches mostly used in canning where the cost of labor is 70 percent of a grower's direct costs.

Why mechanization is important

In , 12 percent of the cling peach tonnage from Yuba County and Sutter County in California will be mechanically harvested. The use of gasoline farm tractors was central to long-term mechanization Figure 1. Innovative advances in farm tractor technology between and dramatically improved efficiency. According to Olmstead and Rhode , early tractors included the Bull , the first small and agile tractor; the Fordson , the first mass-produced tractor; and the Farmall , the first general purpose tractor capable of cultivating row crops such as corn and cotton. The latter was the first gasoline-powered tractor that incorporated a power takeoff system.


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Early gas farm tractor. By , there were equal numbers of draft animals and tractors—approximately 13 million. By , tractors almost totally replaced draft animals as a source of power to run farm operations. With the advent of large four-wheel-drive tractors, along with their accompanying equipment such as the air drill, individual farmers were able to plant, harvest, and maintain a sizable acreage Hurt, It is often suggested that since , farm size in many areas of North America has increased by at least a factor of 10 because of this technology. Small Machinery and Equipment As tractors evolved, so did small machinery and equipment that worked in concert with tractors.

These technologies allowed for a further decrease in labor demand from individual farmers. Figures 2 , 3 , and 4 illustrate examples of labor-saving technology in the small machinery market such as the front-end loader, Leon Dozer Blade, rock pickers, skid-loaders, balers and bale handling equipment, grain carts, and grain truck hydraulic lifts. Some of the equipment has complementary features in that it can be used for both livestock and crop production enterprises. This has enabled producers to diversify into both livestock and grain operations. Modern tractor with hydraulic front-end loader.

Modern tractor with Leon dozer blade. Revegetation Equipment Catalog Figure 4. Degelman With many of the new technological innovations, hydraulics played a major role. For example, with respect to zero-tillage technology discussed below , large machines can be moved easily due to hydraulic systems. The foot air drill can be winged to make it transportable on highways. Therefore farmers are not limited to expanding farm size by buying adjoining properties, as distance is no longer a factor.

This provides much more scope for expanding farm size. Like hydraulics, welders have had a major impact on agricultural efficiency. Welders have allowed farmers to engage in many activities, such as redesigning farm equipment. Zero Tillage Prior to zero-tillage technology, farmers used summer fallow as a risk-management strategy McClinton, Early methods of fallowing included the use of horse-drawn one-ways Figure 5 , discers, and cultivators, while later methods included zero tillage through chem fallowing. Generally, summer fallowing increases soil erosion due to bare fields, depletes soil organic matter over the long term due to minimal fertilizer inputs, and increases soil salinity due to rising groundwater levels McClinton, These practices generally are no longer used in dry-land farming, as most farmers have replaced summer fallowing with continuous cropping practices.

The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan Figure 6. US dust bowl era s. No-till air drills allow for continuous cropping in the absence of summer fallow because this reduces soil erosion and increases soil moisture retention. Accompanying this technology was the introduction of high-clearance sprayers—as opposed to ground-level sprayers—that improve efficiency in the application of fungicides and pesticides.

Mechanised agriculture - Wikipedia

Central Header Parts website The widespread adoption of zero-tillage technology in western Canada has been one of the factors that transformed prairie agriculture. The transformation from a tillage-dominated cereal crop and fallow agriculture economy in the s and s to the diversified direct-seed crop production of the first decade of the 21 st century has been dramatic Schmitz, Benefits from zero tillage include increased carbon sequestration and reduced nitrous oxide emissions, soil erosion and salinity, fuel and labor use, and tractor hours. Agricultural Precision Technology Precision agriculture technology offers farmers opportunities to increase profit by simultaneously decreasing wasted resources and labor costs.


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Some examples include the addition of GPS auto-steer and guidance to reduce overlap, automatic yield monitors, and variable rate technologies VRT for applying liquid fertilizer. For Australian farmers, the annual benefit from cost savings and increased production covered the cost of guidance and auto-steer equipment within three years, while the payback period for yield monitoring and VRT was higher at seven years Mandel et al.

Mechanical Harvesting Technology Mechanical harvesting has become widespread. As noted earlier, mechanization can displace or substitute for workers in cases of labor shortages.


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The most contentious form of mechanization is typically the adoption of harvest technologies for high-valued crops such as fruits and vegetables because of the large amount of agricultural labor involved. Tomatoes The mechanical tomato harvester developed and used in California was supported and criticized by many Figure 8 presents the original tomato harvester.

The rate of return from investment in the harvester was high, but there were social costs such as farmworker displacement. Original mechanical tomato harvester. According to Professor Hartsough, Chair of the University of California UC , Davis Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, the mechanical harvesting of tomatoes was controversial because it seemingly displaced human labor. However, by reducing harvesting costs by nearly one-half, the harvester eliminated an economic constraint on the US tomato processing industry, resulting in large increases of tomato acreage and yield.

Those increases, in turn, provided additional employment in field work, transportation, and processing that more than offset the displaced harvesting jobs UC Davis News Service, Consequently, the adoption of the tomato harvester caused a shift from the variable cost of hand harvest to the high fixed cost of mechanization. Growers were willing to make this investment because of the support from processors in the pricing of tomatoes. These savings were attributable to machines only requiring one pass through the field and machine sorters being paid less than hand pickers.

Due to the larger capital investment required to purchase machinery, growers implemented larger-scale planting to increase yields to offset larger overhead investment costs.

Because planting a single crop would have incurred a higher risk due to vulnerability to market fluctuations and weather, only farmers with sufficient land for other crops could afford to take on the risk of growing tomatoes. Consequently, large-scale planting eventually led to fewer growers with larger acreages 6 deJanvry et al. Cotton The cotton picker and stripper 7 Figure 9 displaced thousands of farm workers in various states, including Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. Like the tractor, combine, and tomato harvester, it contributed to a significant increase in farm size.

Early John Deere cotton stripper. The mechanical cotton picker played an indispensable role in the transition from the prewar South of over-population, sharecropping, and hand labor to the capital-intensive agriculture of the postwar South Holley, While the first patent for a cotton picker was made in , it was almost a century later that a mechanical picker was commercially produced. Steel shortages in the s delayed full-scale production of a mechanical cotton picker until after World War II Holley, A controversial issue of the mechanical cotton harvester was the role it played in the Great Migration of the 20 th century Holley, The popular opinion is that mechanization eliminated jobs and forced farm families to switch to urban employment.

In actuality, emigration from the South in the United States was a product of the desire for higher-paying industry jobs in the North rather than an enclosure movement motivated by landowners who were opposed to sharecroppers mechanizing as quickly as possible. Southern cotton farmers were often hesitant to transition from manual labor to machinery due to the expense and unfamiliarity of the technology Holley, World War II brought many changes to agriculture in the South; the number of farms declined steadily and the size of farms increased 8 Holley, With the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker, the South was no longer dependent on cotton as its major crop.

Cotton acreage was replaced with mechanized crops such as rice and soybeans, thus creating a more diversified agricultural economy.