Ten Inventors Who Built the Farm Machine, from Seed Drill to Center Pivot

Begin with the 1701 horse-drawn seed drill that sowed seed in neat rows, and his horse-drawn hoe. His page also notes that his theory of plant nutrition was largely wrong, since he distrusted manure and believed tillage itself fed plants, yet the straight rows his machines made changed field farming for good.

The Scottish millwright built a working threshing machine with fluted feed rollers and a rotating drum around 1786 at Houston Mill in East Lothian, and patented it in 1788. It mechanized the separation of grain from stalk and husk, and is counted among the key advances of the British Agricultural Revolution.

He demonstrated his mechanical reaper in 1831 and always claimed credit as its single inventor, although his page notes that he built on his father's attempts and a farm mechanic's labor. He won the market with field trials, installment credit and guarantees, and the company he built became the core of International Harvester.

The rival in the reaper priority dispute. He patented his reaping machine in 1833 and was the first person to make, patent and sell such a machine in the United States. His reciprocating knife and slotted guard finger became the standard cutting design in later harvesting machinery, even though the rival machine came to dominate the market.

In 1837 this Illinois blacksmith shaped a polished steel plow that scoured clean in the sticky prairie soil that clogged iron plows. The self-cleaning steel plow opened the Midwest to grain farming, and the company he founded remains one of the world's largest farm equipment makers under his name.

A farmer from DeKalb, Illinois, he received a patent for his twisted double-strand barbed wire design on 24 November 1874 and went on to form the Barb Fence Company with hardware dealer Isaac Ellwood. Cheap, durable fencing transformed ranching and farming across the American Great Plains.

With his business partner Oscar Lamm, the Swedish engineer patented a continuous-feed centrifugal cream separator in 1878, the innovation that made mechanical cream separation commercial. He was a founder of AB Separator, later Alfa Laval, and also worked on steam turbines.

A dairy farmer from Newark, New Jersey, she patented the Hygienic Glove Milker on 18 February 1879. It used vacuum suction to draw milk from all four teats at once while reducing strain on the farmer. Hers was one of the earliest powered milking devices, though it did not reach commercial success in her lifetime.

In 1892 the Iowa inventor and his blacksmith Will Mann mounted a one-cylinder gasoline engine on an engine frame to make one of the first gasoline-powered tractors. His page credits him with the first stable gasoline-powered tractor with forward and reverse gears.

A Nebraska and Colorado farmer, he built a self-propelled center-pivot irrigation prototype by 1948. In 1952 he was granted a patent on a larger system with a 600-foot boom that could water a 135-acre circle, the design that mechanized large-scale sprinkler irrigation on the plains.