Agriculture in the British Industrial Revolution
Agriculture, like most other areas of working life, was greatly affected by the machines invented during the Industrial Revolution. Agriculture in Britain and elsewhere had made leaps forward in the 18th century, and its success released labour for factories in urban areas. From better iron tools to threshing machines, country life was transformed in the never-ceasing search for profit.
Uses of Steam Power in Agriculture
In the 18th century, agricultural activities across the world continued to use people power and animal muscles to make work easier and more efficient. In Europe, and particularly in Britain, the relatively high cost of labour (compared to, for example, Asia), drove inventors to create machines that would make farming cheaper and profits higher by replacing where possible traditional sources of power with machines.
A change to a fundamental farming method came with Andrew Rodger’s invention of the winnowing machine in Scotland in 1737. For millennia wheat had been separated from chaff by simply throwing the two into the wind and allowing the chaff to blow away. The method was effective enough, but the wind had to be not too weak and not too strong, and those days without wind at all were useless. Rodger’s machine worked using an internal fan, and it was capable of separating out the grain, chaff, dust, and straw. The fan was operated by hand, but the machine was another one of those that benefitted from adding a mechanism that used steam power.
The first steam engines to be used in agriculture were those attached to mills. Waterwheels had long been in use to move grinding stones to produce flour, but steam engines could now be used as a backup for when the water level of the river powering the waterwheel was low. Windmills had also been around a long time, but better ironwork during the Industrial Revolution meant that pieces like the sails’ turning mechanism, brakes, and the fantail (which made sure the sails pointed in the direction of the wind) were better made and more efficient than ever before. From the 1860s, a new method of grinding flour, the roller mill, gradually began to replace windmills after its introduction to Britain from central Europe.
By the last quarter of the 18th century, engineers had perfected the steam engine so that it was mobile and fuel-efficient enough to be used anywhere. This mobility of power was particularly useful for agriculture. In 1787, the Scotsman Andrew Meikle (1719-1811) invented the first steam-powered threshing machine (which separates grain from the husk). The machine used a drum with beaters to remove the husk, first using horse or water power and then steam power. It greatly increased the speed at which grain could be threshed. The invention was successful at home and abroad; George Washington (1732-1799) ordered a Meikle threshing machine for his own farm. Another feature of mechanization in the Americas was the introduction of machines on plantations, used, for example, to crush sugar cane. In 1834 in the United States, Cyrus McCormack invented the first mechanized reaping machine. Now a farmer need only hire a machine for when he actually needed it, perhaps only a few weeks in the year.
Mobile steam engines were used to pump out waterlogged areas to make them useful for agriculture – a single machine was capable of draining 24 km² (6000 acres). Drainage trenches were cut using machines, and then pipes were laid down to better drain fields. These works meant areas of common land could be claimed for agricultural use, a process known as enclosure. As technology developed, powerful steam engines could be brought almost anywhere on a farm to uproot trees and hedges to make fields easier and more efficient to plough. Steam power was harnessed, too, for many other tasks such as cutting lumber.
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Industrial Revolution
