"A century later, in 1901, most of the country’s wheat comes from the Great Plains and so we move to the Red River Valley, in eastern [[North Dakota]]. The Great Plains have been settled and industrialization has made enormous advances during the past two generations—although wheat farming still relies on draft animals, **the wheat growing on large [[Dakota]] farms is highly mechanized**. "Teams of four powerful horses pull gang (multi-share) steel plows and harrows, mechanical seed drills are used for planting, mechanical harvesters cut the stalks and bind the sheaves, and only the stooking is done manually. **Sheaves are hauled to stacks and fed to threshing machines powered by steam engines**, and grain is taken to granaries. The entire sequence takes less than 22 hours per hectare, about 1/7 of the time it did in 1801. In this extensive cultivation, large areas make up for low yields: **yields remain low at 1 ton per hectare but the investment of human labor is only about 1.5 minutes per kilogram of grain (compared to 10 minutes in 1801), while the use of draft animals adds up to about 37 horse-hours per hectare, or more than 2 minutes per kilogram of grain**. "This is a new, hybrid kind of farming, as **the indispensable solar input is augmented by non-renewable anthropogenic energies derived overwhelmingly from coal**. The new arrangement requires more animal labor than human labor, and as working horses (and mules in the American South) need grain feed—mainly oats—as well as fresh grass and hay, their large numbers make substantial demands on the country’s crop production: about one-quarter of all American farmland is devoted to growing fodder for draft animals." ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08SGC3TD3&location=1066)) --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[technology]], [[systems-thinking]], [[food-production]], [[farming]], [[solar-energy]], [[photosynthesis]], [[agrarian-economies]], [[Industrial Revolution]], [[industrial-economies]], [[steam-engines]], **Source** -- [[202412030828 - B - How the World Really Works]]