Role of Farm Technology
Bonanza farmers pioneered the development of farm technology and economics. Steam engines were used for motive power in plowing as much as 41 years before the modern farm tractor made its first appearance. Plows and combine harvesters drawn by steam tractors prowled the landscape in the 1880s and 1890s, well before mechanization of the smaller midwestern farms. The division of labor was applied in bonanza farms generations before family farms adapted to these modern ways. Farm boys from the midwest, working on bonanza farms in the early 20th century, transplanted these ideas to Corn Belt homesteads and built larger farms as the century progressed. (An example is Fred Geier, of Lynn Township, McLeod County, Minnesota and Boon Lake Township, Renville County, Minnesota, who travelled to the Dakotas in the early 20th century and became a progressive farmer and custom thresher and miller at a time when others in the townships were still farming with horses on a very small scale. Other than his role as an inventor of the Geier Hitch, this may well have been his most significant contribution to society). They were also used to grow one type of crop for profit on a large estate.
Read more about this topic: Bonanza Farms
Famous quotes containing the words role of, role, farm and/or technology:
“In today’s world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither time nor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“Friends serve central functions for children that parents do not, and they play a critical role in shaping children’s social skills and their sense of identity. . . . The difference between a child with close friendships and a child who wants to make friends but is unable to can be the difference between a child who is happy and a child who is distressed in one large area of life.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)