Sixteen Lives That Changed How Farms Work

Charles Townshend (1674 to 1738) was a statesman who earned the name Turnip Townshend for farming field turnips on his own estate. His interest in the crop ties him to the British Agricultural Revolution, and he opens the path as the improving landowner.

Arthur Young (1741 to 1820) was not himself a successful farmer, yet he built a reputation as an expert on agricultural improvement through his connections and writing. His widely read books include Tour in Ireland (1780) and Travels in France (1792), and he is counted as an early contributor to agricultural economics.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin of 1793 within months of arriving in Georgia as a young Yale graduate. Patent piracy consumed his profits, but the machine's legacy, a cotton South and the expansion of slavery, outweighed his own fortunes entirely, a reminder that a farm invention can reshape a society.

Joseph Henry Gilbert (1817 to 1901) worked with John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted for forty years. One of their key findings was that cereal crops take up nitrogen from the soil, against Justus von Liebig's view that plants obtained nitrogen only from the air, and their experiments made Rothamsted a leading centre of agricultural research.

James Oliver (1823 to 1908) bought a South Bend, Indiana foundry in 1855 and began experimenting with improved plow designs. His Oliver Chilled Plow, for which he registered 45 patents in his lifetime, grew his company into one of the world's largest producers of farm plows and horse-drawn equipment by the late nineteenth century.

Seaman Asahel Knapp (1833 to 1911) was second president of Iowa Agricultural College and later a U.S. Department of Agriculture demonstration agent in the South. He organized farmer-led demonstration plots, most notably a program that helped growers combat the boll weevil, work that helped lay the foundation for the Cooperative Extension system.

Wilbur Olin Atwater (1844 to 1907) turned to the food side of agriculture. He developed the Atwater system, which laid the groundwork for nutrition science in the United States, directed the first U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station at Wesleyan University, and served as the Department of Agriculture's first chief of nutrition investigations.

Benjamin Holt (1849 to 1920) patented and manufactured the first practical crawler-type tread tractor. The continuous track spreads a heavy vehicle's weight over a large area so it does not sink into soft ground, a design still used on heavy agricultural and engineering vehicles, and he founded the Holt Manufacturing Company with his brothers to build it.

Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858 to 1954) founded the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University in 1903 and served as its first dean until 1913. During the Progressive Era he helped establish the Cooperative Extension System, 4-H youth development programs and rural electrification, and his work helped define rural sociology in the United States.

George Washington Carver (c. 1864 to 1943), born into slavery in Missouri, worked at Tuskegee Institute. He taught Southern farmers ruined by cotton monoculture to rotate with peanuts, sweet potatoes and cowpeas that restored their soil, and his bulletins and mobile school carried agronomy to sharecroppers no university would teach.

Charles Vancouver Piper (1867 to 1926) spent most of his career at the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1903. He brought Sudan grass from Africa to North America as a forage crop and wrote The Soybean in 1923 with William Joseph Morse, a monograph that helped establish soybean as a major American crop.

David Fairchild (1869 to 1954) was a botanist and plant explorer credited with introducing more than 200,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, among them soybeans, pistachios, mangoes, nectarines and dates. Certain wheat, cotton and rice varieties he introduced became economically important to American agriculture.

John Boyd Orr (1880 to 1971) was a nutritional physiologist and doctor who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his research into nutrition and for his work as the first Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which linked the farm to the question of feeding the world.

Hugh Hammond Bennett (1881 to 1960) was a pioneer of soil conservation in the United States. His soil studies at home and abroad convinced him that erosion was a serious problem facing the planet, and he headed the Soil Erosion Service, the federal agency now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Verghese Kurien (1921 to 2012) was sent by the Government of India in 1949 to run an experimental creamery at Anand. He set up the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union in 1950, which grew into Amul, and as head of the National Dairy Development Board from 1965 he helped establish similar cooperatives across India, the White Revolution.

Yuan Longping (1930 to 2021) is known as the father of hybrid rice for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s, part of the Green Revolution. Hybrid rice bred from his research has been grown in dozens of countries, and he received the 2004 World Food Prize and the 2004 Wolf Prize in Agriculture.