Word: moldboards
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...central tenet is retiring the old moldboard plow, which laid the earth open to wind and water erosion. Instead farmers leave residue from the previous year's crops in place to hold soil and moisture, then scratch or chisel in seeds, which sprout through the decomposing residue. Crop rotation is used to break insect cycles. Weeds are targeted, controlled by new herbicides that quickly break down and vanish. In this rare and happy story that emerges from centuries of anguished agriculture practices and policies, there is the touch of God's hand soothing the earth and nudging it back...
When something new like this is born, something else must die. The self- scouring polished-steel moldboard plow is not going to expire totally. But history's chapter of giants in the earth with their plows is closing. It has been a glorious story, mistakes...
...shop in Grand Detour, Ill., in 1837. He used a discarded saw blade. The genius was in the metal, sturdy and sharp enough to cut the strong, matted roots of the high-stemmed prairie grass and turn up the rich earth below for planting. The slick surface of the moldboard (the portion of the plow above the share, the cutting edge) kept the plow from gumming up, the curse of wooden moldboards. By 1839 Deere was making 10 plows a year, then 40, and by 1850 production had soared to 2,100 and the huge farm-machinery company...
...Wood placed the plow in the foreground of his landscape Fall Plowing, which hangs behind the desk of John Deere president David H. Stowe Jr. The painting has been used in countless texts on art and history and is worth more than $1 million. By 1922 nearly 700,000 moldboard plows were being built by all U.S. manufacturers. Then came the giant rubber-tire tractors that made it possible to link as many as 24 plow bottoms that turned the earth in great rooster tails as if it were water off the bow of a ship...
...years, out beyond the burgeoning urban areas where suburbanites were grilling marbled steaks and roasting sweet corn to perfection, farmers were in economic distress, and they began to experiment with residue management. Surpluses forced millions of acres to lie idle. Plowing was no longer so sacrosanct. Though 60,000 moldboard plows were manufactured in the nation in 1970, the plow was fading. Last year only 6,300 moldboard plows were sold. Today John Deere does not even manufacture the plowshares and bottoms for the few thousand completed plows it sells. Its new world is about tractor- pulled machines called mulchers...