[2] Shennong was credited with various inventions: these include the hoe,[1] plow[1] (both leisi (耒耜) style and the plowshare), axe, digging wells, agricultural irrigation, preserving stored seeds by using boiled horse urine (to ward off the borers), trade,[1] commerce,[1] money, the weekly farmers market, the Chinese calendar (especially the division into the 24 jieqi or solar terms), and to have refined the therapeutic understanding of taking pulse measurements, acupuncture, and moxibustion, and to have instituted the harvest thanksgiving ceremony (zhaji (蜡祭) sacrificial rite, later known as the laji (腊祭) rite).

[8] In the third century BCE, during times of political crisis and expansionism and wars among Chinese kingdoms, Shennong received new myths about his status as an ideal prehistoric ruler who valued laborers and farmers and "ruled without ministers, laws or punishments.

"[8] Sima Qian (司馬遷) mentioned that the rulers directly preceding the Yellow Emperor were of the house (or societal group) of Shennong.

[9] Sima Zhen, who added a prologue for the Records of the Grand Historian (史記), said his surname was Jiang (姜), and proceeded to list his successors.

An older and more famous reference is in the Huainanzi; it tells how, prior to Shennong, people were sickly, wanting, starved and diseased; but he then taught them agriculture, which he himself had researched, eating hundreds of plants — and even consuming seventy poisons in one day.

Here, he is referenced as coming to power after the end of the house (or reign) of Paoxi (Fu Xi), also inventing a bent-wood plow, a cut-wood rake, teaching these skills to others, and establishing a noonday market.

[11] Another reference is in the Lüshi Chunqiu, mentioning some violence with regard to the rise of the Shennong house, and that their power lasted seventeen generations.

Shennong is credited with identifying hundreds of medical (and poisonous) herbs by personally testing their properties, which was crucial to the development of traditional Chinese medicine.

Scholarly works mention that the paternal family of famous Song dynasty General Yue Fei traced their origins back to Shennong.