FARM MACHINERY AS AN ECONOMIC FACTOR 263 



between the American farmer and the Chinese farmer, or the 

 American farmer of today and the American farmer of fifty 

 years ago, is a difference mainly of equipment and the efficient 

 use of that equipment. 



The effect of the use of modern machinery on our people 

 is many fold. It has really made possible our high stage of 

 development. In fact, the development of any country is 

 measured by its ability to produce an adequate food supply. 

 It has been only a few years ago that people of this country 

 thot that starvation was staring them in the face. That was 

 in times of peace. It has been estimated that in 1800, 97 

 per cent of the people of the United States lived on farms, 

 and many of them felt the bite of hunger. 



Our farm population decreased slowly until 1850 from 97 

 per cent to 90 per cent. This was during a period of a half- 

 century. There was no marked development of farm ma- 

 chinery during this period, and our development along other 

 lines was equally retarded. It was the imaginative minds of 

 such men as John Deere, who gave us the first steel plow in 

 1837; McCormick, who gave us the binder in 1834, and Pitts, 

 who gave us the threshing machine in 1837, that made a start 

 for modern farm machinery. Few of these machines were 

 built before 1850, but after this period, when factories were 

 established and the number of machines built began to in- 

 crease, the production of food on a much larger scale was made 

 possible, and during the next fifty-year period the population 

 decreased from 90 per cent to about 40 per cent on the farm, 

 or a little over one-third of the total population was on 

 farms. 



We can easily imagine the condition that we would be in at 

 the present time if 97 per cent of our people were on the farms 



