Intro to Ag Innovations
Storyboard Text
- The use of iron brought in the age of mechanization, then electricity also helped to bring the change of 90% of the population being farmers to less than 2. One person could do the job of several.
- There wasn't much progress in agricuture for thousands of years but in the early 1800's that changed.
- What does threshing mean?
- Cyrus McCormick developed the reaper, to cut small grain, then a threshing machine was added to it to make the precursor of our modern combine. Today's combine can cut and thresh as much as 100 people could in the 1800's.
- That's when you separate the actual grain from the stalks of the plants, or the straw.
- Many plants and animals have been changed over the generations due to breeding. Thanksgiving used to be big family affairs, with people getting together from all over. They wanted a big turkey, so they were bred to be 30 pounds or larger.
- Families decreased in size, but still wanted turkeys so they were bred to be smaller, 8 to 12 pounds, like the Beltsville Small White breed.
- Eli Whitney here--I am responsible for the cotton gin. Anna Baldwin invented the milking machine and Benjamin Holt developed the tractor.. all in the late 1800's and early 1900's.
- I'm Thomas Jefferson and a fellow named John Deere took the iron plow I created and developed the steel moldboard plow... that started his company.
- So, many of the new inventions and developments were built on older ideas.
- That's right. In fact, what's now called "The Green Revolution" was a time in the 60's where many countries fighting starvation became self-sufficient in food production by using improved plant varieties and better management practices.
- But we have more and different problems now. How are we going to solve them?
- We are going to solve them because of people like YOU! New ideas, techniques, technologies and ways of looking at our world are always being discovered and developed. We have belief that as more challenges arise, people like you will take what we have done and make it better, just as we did.
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