Evolution of American Agriculture/Chapter III
CHAPTER III.
Agricultural periods
FIVE PERIODS mark the agricultural history of the United States since the advent of the white man. The first or Colonial period extends to the end of the Revolutionary War and records but slight technical advances in the art of agriculture. It was a period of clearing the forests, breaking the soil, and generally experimenting with crops and cultural methods. On the whole, it was a self-sufficing period; that is, the farmers derived practically their entire living from their own farms and had a small surplus to exchange for a few necessary commodities and services with the merchants and craftsmen in the village. The country, however, did export some wheat from the Middle Colonies, tobacco from all the Southern Colonies, rice and indigo from the Carolinas and Georgia, and a small quantity of cotton from the Sea Islands.
The second period, from 1783 to 1830, saw a rapid spread of the agricultural population across the mountains into the Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee Valleys and even beyond the Mississippi to the edge of the great plains. A public land policy was adopted by the Federal Government, cotton became the dominant agricultural product of the South and made slavery a paying and therefore a characteristically Southern institution, and the first efforts to apply science to agriculture were made. During this period, as in the first one, agriculture was practically self-sufficing, though in the South the specialization on cotton caused a considerable dependence on other regions for supplies that otherwise would have been produced at home.
In the third period, from 1830 to 1865, occurred an almost complete transformation of agriculture. The rapid rise of the factory system in the North, due to the use of steam and a flood of labor saving inventions with a consequent transfer of home industries into the shops, the invention of agricultural machinery such as the reaper, mower, thresher, etc., the extension of the railway system and the development of the prairie states caused an era of specialization which transferred agriculture into the commercial stage. Crops were now grown primarily for the market and incidentally for the use of the farmer and his family, a reversal of the former process. The new necessities of the farmer gave him a new view of his industry and in his effort to meet the new situation he turned to agricultural societies, fair associations and the scientific breeding of live stock, all of which were of wonderful assistance in the development of the country by demonstrating its resourcefulness.
The fourth period was the era of expansion into the Far West (1865–1887), and was remarkably stimulated by the Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1864, the disbanding of the Armies of the Civil War, the transformation of Southern farming due to the abolition of slavery, the invention of the twine binder and the roller process of milling flour, the extension of the railroads to the Pacific Coast, the greater extention of the interior railway systems, the development of the cattle ranches of the West after the extinction of the buffalo and the cooping up of the Indians on the reservations, and a new flood of immigration from European ports. Manufacture experienced an equal expansion at this time and more of the home industries were transferred from the farm to the factory and the shop.
The fifth period, which began in 1887, is now practically completed by the establishment of the Rural Credit or Land Bank system throughout the country. This period has been an era of agricultural reorganization. The easily available public lands were exhausted and intensive methods of cultivation came into vogue in the Eastern and Central sections with a rapid rise in land values. State and Federal schemes for irrigation and drainage were put through to increase the acreage of arable lands. Agricultural colleges were established to spread scientific cultural methods so that the food supply might keep pace with the demands of an increasing industrial population, research work in the realm of agriculture was vigorously prosecuted by numerous experiment stations under State and Federal control, and the period closes with the establishment of a separate system of finance designed to place the agricultural capitalist on a par with the commercial capitalist in the money markets of the world by modilizing and standardizing the basis of his credit.