Inventor

Agricultural Efficiency.

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century the amount of acreage a family could cultivate often depended on how many people they could get into the fields. As a result most farmers who produced for the market faced continual labor shortages, especially in the harvest season; but this would soon change. New machines cut the time required for harvesting grains roughly in half between 1800 and 1840, and half again by 1880. Farm production and efficiency grew rapidly, a crucial development for the economy of the West.

John Deere Plows.

Iron and steel plows soon replaced those made of wood. In 1837 John Deere constructed his first iron plow with a steel edge. He annually manufactured one thousand plows by the mid 1840s and ten thousand a year the following decade. These new plows allowed the settler to slice into mile after mile of otherwise...