![]() Plowing is primarily a means of uprooting weeds and killing them in order to stop them from competing with crops. Today, the company he founded is part of a revolution in agricultural technology that is moving away from the plow that birthed it. Deere established a process for perfecting the plow, which led to the creation of a company that has invented or mass-produced not only plows but also cultivators, combines and tractors that have reshaped a large percentage of the Earth's landscape. John Deere did not invent the steel plow in 1837 any more than Henry Ford invented the automobile. He has a particularly good plow and as his business grows into new markets he is competing with other sellers.They are all borrowing ideas from each other. “John Deere was one of a few plow makers who were all experimenting with new technologies. “That's the old story and it’s kind of true and kind of not,” says Liebhold. The popular story is that John Deere had a eureka moment, invented the steel plow that won the West, and that this is one of the first three plows that Deere personally forged. In the American History Museum, there is a very old plow. Without the roots of native plants to hold the soil down, a drought turned the loose soil into dust that literally buried entire towns. The Dust Bowl of the 1930's was a direct result of large-scale plowing with the technological descendants of Deere's steel plow. The modern plow has helped to feed billions, but also contributed to massive erosion that has damaged farmland and polluted waterways. One of the downsides to that is that the soil gets washed away.” It's all about getting rid of the native stuff that's there and turning the soil over. Lane's was a commercial success in the sense that farmers wanted to buy his plows, but Lane never moved beyond making plows one at a time (which was how all plows were made).Ī shift from that thinking into industrial-scale production was what made John Deere's name synonymous with farm technology.īut there was a problem. “People put a lot of land into cultivation,” says Peter Liebhold, curator of the division of work and industry at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Another Illinoisan blacksmith, John Lane, is credited as among the first inventors of the steel plow in 1833. Steel could shed, or scour, the sticky black prairie soil. The smooth surface of steel seemed like a logical alternative to coarser iron. John Deere (1804-1886) established a process for perfecting the plow, which led to the creation of a company that has invented or mass-produced not only plows but also cultivators, combines and tractors. It tended to clump up on the blade of a plow, requiring a farmer to stop every few minutes to clear it. The soil was stickier than the sandier soils back east. ![]() The plants of the native prairie had a tangle of tough roots that standard plows of the day had difficulty cutting through. ![]() One of the major obstacles was the soil itself. If that soil could be cultivated, fortunes could be made. ![]() Farmland with rich, black soil stretched out like an ocean of grass. ![]() In the 1830's, young America was moving west and settling the prairie. John Deere's early steel plows represent a key moment in time where Stone age technology was upgraded into something of which Henry Ford certainly would have been proud. Steel, engines and mass production resulted in farming equipment that rapidly bent most of the planet's land to the will of human beings. Transformation of land was incremental until the industrial revolution. The earliest plows drawn by livestock first appear in the archaeological record about 8,000 years ago. He forged the blade into a plow and the plow forged a farming revolution.Īs the Anthropocene epoch arose, the reshaping of the Earth's surface has largely taken place, one furrow at a time, behind plows. Martin Van Buren was president, a financial crisis was in the news and America's most popular song was, ironically, “ Woodman, Spare That Tree.” Steel was a scarce commodity in those days and the old blade caught the eye of a young visiting blacksmith named John Deere, who took it home. The mill was probably filled with the nutty scent of freshly cut white oak and one imagines that the discarded blade was covered in a layer of fine, pale sawdust. In 1837 in an Illinois sawmill, a long, steel saw blade broke. ![]()
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