Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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Grazed by buffalo for at least two hundred thousand years, the Great
Plains had a thick cover of tough grass that protected the fragile loess.
Wandering across the plains the great herds manured the grasslands,
enriching the soil. Much of the biomass lay below ground in an extensive
network of roots that supported the prairie grass. Traditional plows could
not cut through the thick mat that held the plains together. So the first settlers
simply kept heading West.
Then in 1838 John Deere and a partner invented a steel plow capable of
turning up the prairie’s thick turf. When he began selling his unstoppable
plow, Deere set the stage for a humanitarian and ecological disaster
because, once plowed, the loess of the semiarid plains simply blew away in
dry years. Deere sold a thousand of his new plows in 1846. A few years later
he was selling ten thousand a year. With a horse or an ox and a Deere plow
a farmer could not only plow up the prairie sod, but farm more acreage.
Capital began to replace labor as the limiting factor in farm production.
Another new labor-saving machine, Cyrus McCormick’s mechanized
harvester helped revolutionize farming and reconfigure the relation
between American land, labor, and capital. The McCormick reaper consisted
of a blade driven back and forth by gears as the contraption cut and
stacked wheat while it advanced. McCormick began testing designs in
1831; by the 1860s thousands of his machines were being assembled each
year at his Chicago factory. With a Deere plow and a McCormick reaper a
farmer could work far more land than his predecessors.
In the early 1800s American farms relied on methods familiar to Roman
farmers, broadcasting seed by hand and walking behind plows pulled by
horses or mules. The amount of labor available to a typical family limited
the size of farms. Early in the twentieth century tractors replaced horses and
mules. At the end of the First World War, there were about 85,000 tractors
working on U.S. farms. Just two years later the number tripled to almost a
quarter of a million. With steel plows and iron horses, a twentieth-century
farmer could work fifteen times as much land as his nineteenth-century
grandfather. Today, farmers can plow up eighty acres a day listening to the
radio in the air-conditioned cab of a leviathan tractor unimaginable to John
Deere, let alone a Roman farmer.
As they spread west, Deere’s magical plows turned formerly undesirable
land into a speculator’s paradise. The Territory of Oklahoma (Indian territory,
in Chocktaw) was set aside as a reservation for the Cherokee, Chickasaw,
Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations in 1854. It did not take long
before the Indians’ practice of maintaining open prairie seemed a waste to
dust blow