Argriculture Essay 🌱

Back in 10,000 B.C., there was a lot of farming going on in the home we call Earth.
Farming has actually been around for many years, it has also improved to become better
and stronger. Agriculture (around 12,000 years ago) was a really important topic even though
it sounds bland. Even though it’s not the most interesting it is very critical to the generation now.
The reasoning behind this is basically if we didn’t have all the older technology to farm, grow food
and harvest food we wouldn’t have any food or even edible resources today. At this time in history,
many people came up with inventions for farming. Some of these inventions include the plough,
grain elevator, the roller and the cotton gin. 

The plough (or also spelt as plow) is a very intimidating-looking device back in the days,
it is equipped with curved hooks/shovel ends that grinds against the soil. This device is
the most important to agricultural implement since the beginning of human history.
Created by John Fowler during the mid-19th century the plough is used to turn and break
up the soil to bury crop residues and to help control the growth of weeds. If we didn’t have
the plough today or at all our crop fields would be full of weeds and we wouldn’t be able to
plant our food sources faster and more efficiently, therefore meaning the lack of harvest we
would get back. The plough is quite useful and has now become a more modern mechanism
in our era- meaning it is the big trailer looking thing tractors pull behind them. So the plough has
gotten bigger, stronger and is still around with its fancy new upgrades. 

A grain elevator? Sounds kinda outlandish… In fact, a grain elevator is also an agrarian
facility complex designed to stockpile or store grains. The term “grain elevator” also describes
a tower containing a bucket elevator or pneumatic conveyor (containing or operated by air/gas
under pressure.) Which scoops up grain from a lower level and deposits it in a silo or other storage
facility. The reasoning why we need the grain elevator is to make it easier on us to move tiny pieces
of grain and to keep them all together. Since they have been quiet thought out about the grain all gets
sorted and kept together with its own type and will keep there until needed again. William Hespeler
in Niverville, Manitoba constructed the first-ever grain elevator as a wooden silo-like building back
in 1879. A more familiar form of the grain elevator made an appearance in 1881 in Gretna, Manitoba
when Ogilvie Milling Company built a wooden square 25,000-bushel grain elevator. Grain elevators
are usually located near railways/waterways to accommodate shipping the grain out after being
processed through the machine. It is easy to recognize the grain elevator due to its large cylindrical
shape. The sum it all up after the grain makes it’s way to an elevator, it is then dumped from the
truck to a work floor of a grain elevator. A work floor is an open slatted floor where the grain dumps
into a pit and will then travel on a continuous belt that has buckets attached to scoop up the grain
then deposits it into a silo. There are many grain elevators around in the world and if you are driving
around looking out a window near the countryside you will more than likely
see the same old grain elevator.

Now onto the one and only roller! No not hair rollers, I mean rollers for the plants.
Rollers are a secondary tillage tool used for flattening land or breaking up large clumps
of soil especially after the tool the “plough” or “disc harrowing” has happened. Rolling is
also believed to help reduce moisture loss from cultivated soil. If that made completely
no sense a roller is used to smooth out uneven surfaces caused by heavy traffic and can
be used to press uprooted or heaved plants back into the soil to prevent desiccation,
Rolling can produce a firm surface to provide a “faster” surface for plants to grow. Of course,
a roller is still used today except who invented it? Although I cannot find the answer to that,
I think it had something to do with the road roller. A roller is literally just a huge rolling pin that
can provide more oxygen for the soil. 

Last but not least is the cotton gin. Yes, it is a very old but useful piece of machinery.
A cotton gin or a cotton engine is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibres
from their seeds, enabling them much greater productivity than manual cotton separations.
While slavery was a common thing the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, except
it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. Cotton growing became so
profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor.
The human who invented this device was Eli Whitney who invented it in 1793. Suddenly we
could turn a profit on this terribly labour-intensive crop (so the cotton gin had negative uses.)
From then until the Civil War the slave population increased to the astonishing level of 4,000,000.
In fact, the cotton gin is still around but is more modern. The modern cotton gin uses the teeth of
rotating saws to pull the cotton through a series of “ginning ribs” which pull the fibres from the seeds
which are too large to pass through the ribs. The cleaned seed is then removed from the gin
via an auger conveyor system (so we don’t have slaves.)

Agriculture is a very important thing in our time, it shows us how farming has changed
over the years and how we don’t need slaves or anything like that. In farming, we have
changed our horrible ways in the past to now using inventions to help us manage the farmlands.
All Agricultural technologies all have an interesting story behind them, some that you wouldn’t

even expect.