1. The Inventions of the Agricultural Revolution
By Charlie Miller and Grace Deatherage

2. Summary
There were many inventions produced during the Industrial Revolution. The Agricultural Revolution was a major part of the Industrial Revolution.
The agricultural inventions affected the way people live today because they lead to better ways of farming and a population explosion.
Today, agricultural inventions have gotten better and better and are more common in modern farming.

3. The Plow
One of the more important agricultural inventions was the plow.
These tools were needed to turn a deep furrow for planting seeds
There has been a certain form of plowing for thousands of years, but John Deere made a huge impact on the invention of plows
Early plows were crooked sticks that did nothing more than scratching the ground
John Deere developed and marketed the first self-polishing cast steel plow
This made it much easier to turn soil, because before that, plows were simply heavy chunks of tough wood cut into shape with a wrought iron point clumsily attached to it. This was much harder to use until John Deere invented the iron plow.
It had one or more heavy blades that would break the soil and cut a small ditch. There are many different types of plows; snow plows, farm equipment plows, and disc plows.
Ever since then, inventors have been coming up with more and more ideas to improve this invention which has led all the way to the production of tractors.

4. The Mechanical Reaper
An agricultural invention that has also been improved by numerous inventors ever since was the mechanical reaper.
The mechanical reaper was invented by Cyrus Hall McCormick in Before the mechanical reaper, people would do this by hand by plucking the ears of corn by hand and use some tools to cut grain stalks and gather them together to make bunches of stalks. This work was long and tedious.
When the mechanical reaper was invented, this work could be done twice as fast.
The reaper was pulled along by horses and a reel would cut the grain
Several models of the reaper were built in Great Britain and four came to the United States. The only model that was never really adopted was the Bell’s machine.
It is now used a lot in today’s agricultural marketplace.

5. The Seed Drill The seed drill was invented by Jethro Tull in 1701.
It was used to drill seed in row and cover up the seeds in rows with soil
The seed drill allows farmers to drill seeds in separate rows at a certain depth at a certain rate
How it works is that the seed row has tubes that create a hole of a specific depth and it drops the seed in. Each tube drops the seed in at the same time in different well-spaced rows and does this repetitively.
This makes planting much faster and easier.

6. The Steam Engine
The steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid
The mechanical motion that the steam engine performed was produced by boiling water
The steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen and paved the way to the Industrial Revolution
It pumped water
How it worked was that it used the vacuum that condensed steam in a cylinder
it was employed for many things, but mainly for draining mine workings at depths nearly impossible
It was also used for providing a reusable water supply for driving waterwheels at factories sited away from a suitable “head”.
A vacuum generated by condensing steam ran the steam engine.
Cylinders were build large for the steam engine because the only usable force acting on them was atmospheric pressure. Steam was only used to compensate for the atmosphere allowing the piston to move back to its starting position.

7. The Steam Boat
Robert Fulton was the first to invent steamboats commercially
The steam boat was used to ship industrial products down rivers
The steamboat greatly contributed to the growth of economy because it was able to lower freight rates, cut transportation time, and create jobs
They were an inexpensive source of transportation
The steam boat was highly used in countries such as North America, Canada, and Vietnam.
Steamboats were soon used to ship goods overseas.
Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat was the first sea-going steamer in Europe
Steam boats originated in Europe, but became more widely used when it was introduced to America.

8. Barbed Wire
Barbed wire changes life as far as the rifle, six-shooter, telegraph, windmill, and livestock
It was first introduced in France by Leonce Eugene Grassin-Baledans in 1860.
Glidden got his idea of barbed wire fences from a wooden strip with metallic points at a fair patented by Henry Rose.
Barbed wire fencing played an important role in protecting property rights in the U.S.
With regular wire fences, livestock would cross range boundaries.
Barbed wire’s introduction to the west in the 1870s greatly lowered the cost of enclosing land
It makes excellent boundary lines
Today, barbed wire fences are used to separate countries making borders. They also delimit refugee camps.

9. How Does Biodynamic Agriculture Work?
The Biodynamic farming expands on organism’s sustainable and natural approach which is a holistic or farms as an organism school of thought. The word Biodynamic Farming suggests that: a combination of biological and dynamic practices also, “bio” meaning life and “dyn” meaning force.
Like Organic farming Biodynamic farms care for how humans treat animals and food with its quality the soil and how rich the soil is.
In the 20th century farmers started using more Chemical fertilizer in there crops for food and some found the soil weaken and the food had become weaker in their quality.
One of the few men who saw this problem is Dr. Rudolph Steiner, a scientist, philosopher, and founder of the Waldorf School developed the idea to start biodynamic agriculture in Europe in 1924.
Mr. Steiner thought that we should treat the farm with respect and that it is a live organism that should be able to maintain and create everything in a natural way.

10. What are the Principles and Methods of Biodynamic Farming?
At first it might seam that Biodynamic farmers are magical or something, but rely all what they do is practice recycling cow dung and putting it into the gowned to help more things to eat, so that more organisms can grow.
Biodynamic farmers follow a spiritual methodology which organic agriculture does not use at all.
Biodynamic farmers also practice a series of steps for keeping farms sustainable and self-nourishing, as Steiner wanted people to do it.
Biodynamic farmers try to keep the world as natural as possible using the phase of the moon to tell when it’s best to start planting seeds and knowing the affect and how it will help them grow. This is again the way they keep it sustainable farming practice.

11. What is Plant Diversity?
It’s a method of keeping soil health just by allowing a variety of plaints to grow on uncultivated or not used for growing lands; its enhancement by mixing crops so that the plaints could work with and for each other.
The practice of rotating crops from fields to fields and raising different animal species, along with corn crops and others, encourages the healthy soil, reduces the parasites and controls weeds and pests.
Diversity, crop rotation, animal life, composting homeopathic solutions and life forces are all the six principles of biodynamic farming.
Conventional farming practices such as a farm planting and harvesting soybeans on the same fields year after year. In contrast, crop rotation and an assortment of animal life are an important part of sustainable agriculture.
The practice of rotating crops from field to field and raising varied animal species, along with cover crops and green manures, encourages healthy soil, reduces parasites and controls weeds and pests.

12. What is Composition?
Composition is elemental in biodynamic agriculture. It is the source of healthy soil and the recycled manures and organic waste
Humus which is vital to the farm. When spread on fields, the humus stabilizes nitrogen in the soil, and is vital to crop productivity.
There are nine homeopathic preparations based on extracts from animal, plant and mineral manure, each diluted into sprays and used sparingly to homeopathically treat compost, soil and plants.
Dynamization- each preparation is numbered, 500 through 508 six are key to composting, two are used to stimulate humus and one is used to suppress fungal disease on crops.
Life force-separates biodynamic farming from other agriculture it's because, the acknowledgement that in addition to earthly influences, cosmic forces (moon phases, seasonal cycles) play a role in the life of the farm.

13. Irrigation
Irrigation was an important part of the agricultural revolution
Irrigation has gone a long way for farmers
Irrigation was improved in several different forms in the agricultural revolution
One of them was surface irrigation
In surface irrigation systems, water simply moves across the land by gravity in order to wet and infiltrate the soil
Farmers also used and still use sub irrigation, a system in which the water table is raised the allow the soil to be moistened from below the plants’ root zone.
There are many forms of irrigation that have been invented throughout the years, and new forms of irrigation are continually being introduced today.

14. Some forms of modern irrigation are the sprinkler, center pivot, lateral move, automatic, and much more.
The center pivot irrigation system is a form of sprinkler irrigation containing several different pipes.
They are supported by trusses, which are a structure comprising one or more triangular units constructed with straight members whose ends are connected at joints referred to as nodes.
The trusses are mounted on wheeled towers with sprinklers positioned along its length.
These systems are found and used in all parts of the world and allow irrigation of all types of terrain.
Another common type of irrigation that is used for crops is the lateral move
A lateral move is a series of pipes, each with a wheel of about 1.5m in diameter and sprinklers along its length.
They are paired in couples at one end of a field.
Water is supplied at one end using a large hose. After sufficient water has been applied, the hose is removed and the remaining assembly rotated. The process is repeated until the opposite end of the field is reached.
This system is less expensive to install than the center pivot, but it is more laborious when operating and it carries a limited amount of water.

15. Irrigation has benefited more than just farmers
Irrigation has benefited more than just farmers. Before irrigation people would bathe, and get their drinking water from the same river. Sometimes, people would dump the pots from their outhouses into rivers. This lead to poor health, poor hygiene diarrhea, and many other problems that could sometimes be fatal. When a form of irrigation called running water was introduced to society, people could drink clean water and do much more that would lead to better health and hygiene. That is one of the reasons why the agricultural revolution led to the population explosion.

16. Water can be scarce in some places due to dry climates, global warming, and an increasing population.
One example is the Central and Southern California.
Central and Southern California often have periods of droughts.
To resolve this problem, they try to conserve water by not wasting too much of it.
They have also built a canal that allows the water from Northern California to go to Southern California.

17. Fertilizer
Fertilizer is organic or inorganic material of natural or synthetic origin that is added to a soil to supply one or more plant nutrients essential to the growth of plants.
A recent assessment showed that about 40 to 60% of crop yields are attributed to commercial fertilizer use.
All fertilizers are divided into organic and inorganic.
Inorganic fertilizer produces ammonia as the end product. This ammonia is used as a feedstock for other nitrogen fertilizers.
Ammonia can be combined with rock phosphate, which is a non-detrital sedimentary rock which contains high amounts of phosphate containing minerals.
Ammonia also contains potassium fertilizer in the Odda Process, also known as the Nitro phosphate Process.
The Nitro phosphate Process was the method for the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizers.
This process produced compound fertilizer.
Organic fertilizer includes naturally occurring organic materials, or naturally occurring mineral deposits.
Organic fertilizers have been known to improve biodiversity and long term productivity of soil.
However, they also contain pathogens and other diseases causing organisms if not properly composted.
This invention made farmers grow rich, nourished crops which meant better farming.
All farmers use fertilizers to grow their crops

18. Organic fertilizers have been known to improve biodiversity and long term productivity of soil.
However, they also contain pathogens and other diseases causing organisms if not properly composted.
This invention made farmers grow rich, nourished crops which meant better farming.
All farmers use fertilizers to grow their crops