The Father of Modern Agriculture
"My father was a farmer, my grandfather was an inventor", these were the words of my grandmother, Lavonne Holland. She was speaking proudly about my great-great grandfather, the inventor, Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-1884). She also told me, "Not many people know who Cyrus McCormick is these days, but his memory will live forever in the fields of waving grain"(Holland). The most important thing my Grandmother said to me was, "In the generations around that of my great grandfathers, the planting of grain was dependant only on the ability of the reapers to gather the grain by hand"(Holland). Which meant the crop size was limited to how much that was possible to cut, and the failure of a small crop could have meant famine for that family. However all of this was soon to change, new mechanical inventions would help to change the face of farming forever. This paper will only begin to emphasize a few of the major contributions of Cyrus McCormick the man who is commonly known as, the father of modern agriculture. Cyrus Hall McCormick was born near Lexington, Virginia in 1809. One can only imagine how he spent his free time as a boy on his family's 532-acre farm known as "walnut grove"(McCormick). H
In 1831, his efforts were rewarded, when he held the first demonstration of his mechanical reaper. McCormick still had to face many great challenges, for many years he battled in court defending his patent rights; he even lost a case to the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln (Brenner). Cyrus McCormick furthered his practical approach by making replacement parts easy to acquire anywhere around the world, similar to the part distributor stores of today (Brenner). It is important to look back in time to understand how technology has changed our lives, and to give credit to the founders of technology. He proved he could harvest fifteen times more grain than by hand (McCormick). For centuries men and women had spent many long backbreaking hours laboring in the fields, fields not limited by how much grain that could be grown, but limited by how much grain that could be cut. This paper could have been titled, "Cyrus McCormick's reaper and its impact on farming", however the reaper not only affected farming, it changed the entire world. Cyrus McCormick's invention of the mechanical reaper made it possible for fewer farmers to cultivate much more grain, in much less time. The invention of the reaper, over time, turned many small family-farming communities into large-scale farms, and allowed many people to seek employment in the cities. Unfortunately for Robert, he would never turn his dreams of a mechanical reaping machine into reality (McCormick). Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper actually started the paradigm of mechanical farming. Then in 1871 he lost everything in the Chicago fire (McCormick). It did not take long for young Cyrus to catch the dream of his father. McCormick himself could have never foreseen the impact that his invention would have on the entire world. The invention of the mechanical reaper had only accomplished a small part of Cyrus McCormick's work.
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