Essay 11-B: Cyrus Mccormick and the Rise of Mechanical Farming
We’ve all heard about the crisis of artificial intelligence and jobs—how AI is going to render millions unemployed. Yet we may not know about the employment crisis of American agriculture in the mid-19th century when mechanical harvesters sliced through the employment of farm laborers.
That wasn’t a crisis at all, it was progress! You see, working as a manual laborer on a farm, cutting crops with a scythe in the hot sun, was actually not such a good job.
So when mechanical reapers were mass-produced, beginning in the 1840s, the standard of living for Americans rose: Farming grew more efficient, and so farm workers migrated to towns and cities, where they found jobs in factories, even as they benefited from lower food prices.
In 1820, nearly 80 percent of American jobs were on the farm; by 1900, that percentage had fallen to 40 percent (today, it’s less than two percent). During those same eight decades, it is estimated that the real gross domestic product of the U.S. rose by more than 600 percent.
