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It's early to rise, for there is much to accomplish on an autumn day. Bring in the horses. Make sure they are fed and watered. Get a team groomed, harnessed and hitched to the corn wagon. It's late in the season, and the window of time to get the crops harvested is quickly closing. A farm worker helps the driver cut corn. They work two rows at a time, picking ears of corn one after the other, and hope to get 28 bushels an acre.
This was farming in 1907.
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| Picking corn by hand has been replaced by combines that harvest many rows at once and include global positioning systems and digital instrumentation. Equipment technology is one of the many improvements made possible by scientific research. |
A century later, a producer fills up a combine with fuel before hopping in the air-conditioned cab to head to the fields. Now farmers see 200 bushels per acre. Combines harvest 12-plus rows and have global positioning systems and automatic steering.
Advances in science and technology have made it possible for farmers to do in an hour what used to take a day. The Purdue University Department of Agronomy, which marks its centennial this year, has been on the cutting edge of research all that time, helping to improve equipment technologies, soil management, and seed genetics and breeding.
It's more critical now than ever that we continue to use science and technology to propel agriculture forward, because there are more mouths to feed, more uses for crops and fewer farmers," says Craig Beyrouty, head of the agronomy department at Purdue.
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