Focusing on the collaborative tensions between farmers and manufacturers, this book explores the development of farm machinery in the Midwest. It examines technology, marketing, financing, labor, and repair, revealing farmers agency in shaping farm implements and providing fresh insights into agricultural and technological history.
How farmers shaped the development of agricultural machinery
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, farmers in the midwestern United States and in Ontario began adopting new agricultural machines: threshers, reapers, and drills for more efficient production of grains, as well as sewing and washing machines for more efficient production within the farm household. By using, maintaining, and altering these machines within the natural and social contexts of their farms, rural people produced new technological systems of industrial agriculture. They also struggled with machine manufacturers and their agents for control of those systemsboth individually and through farmers organizations. Cultivating Machines contributes to historiographies of capitalism, technology, and agriculture as it demonstrates the importance of everyday know-how and informed tinkering to the mechanization of grain agriculture.
In this study, James Rick moves from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and the introduction of horse-powered machines, to the end of the century, when mechanized technologies became indispensable and central parts of farms themselves. Ultimately, large-scale wheat production, the increased complexity of machines, the need for replacement parts, and the efforts of manufacturers and their agents to assert themselves as authorities over industrial agriculture diminished the technological independence of farming people.
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How farmers shaped the development of agricultural machinery
James Rick is a scholar of the nineteenth-century United States with particular interest in the histories of agriculture, technology, and the Midwest. He received his PhD in history from William & Mary and teaches in the social studies department at St. John's College High School in Washington, DC.
