Agricultural machinery

Agricultural steam engines took over the heavy pulling work of oxen, and were also equipped with a pulley that could power stationary machines via the use of a long belt.

The steam-powered machines were low-powered by today's standards but because of their size and their low gear ratios, they could provide a large drawbar pull.

Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), sorghum, soybeans, flax (linseed), sunflowers and rapeseed.

Besides the tractor, other vehicles have been adapted for use in farming, including trucks, airplanes, and helicopters, such as for transporting crops and making equipment mobile, to aerial spraying and livestock herd management.

Though modern harvesters and planters may do a better job or be slightly tweaked from their predecessors, the combine of today still cuts, threshes, and separates grain in the same way it has always been done.

However, technology is changing the way that humans operate the machines, as computer monitoring systems, GPS locators and self-steer programs allow the most advanced tractors and implements to be more precise and less wasteful in the use of fuel, seed, or fertilizer.

[1][6] The technological evolution in agriculture has been a journey from manual tools to animal traction, then to motorized mechanization, and further to digital equipment.

Motorized mechanization, for instance, automates operations like ploughing, seeding, fertilizing, milking, feeding, and irrigating, thereby significantly reducing manual labor.

[9] This is due mostly to companies using intellectual property law to prevent farmers from having the legal right to fix their equipment (or gain access to the information to allow them to do it).

[11] The Open Source Agriculture movement counts different initiatives and organizations such as Farm Labs which is a network in Europe,[12] l'Atelier Paysan which is a cooperative to teach farmers in France how to build and repair their tools,[13][14] and Ekylibre which is an open-source company to provide farmers in France with open source software (SaaS) to manage farming operations.

[14][15] In the United States, the MIT Media Lab's Open Agriculture Initiative seeks to foster "the creation of an open-source ecosystem of technologies that enable and promote transparency, networked experimentation, education, and hyper-local production".

[18] Plants with the same genetics can naturally vary in color, size, texture, growth rate, yield, flavor, and nutrient density according to the environmental conditions in which they are produced.