May is a busy time for farmers in corn-growing areas, with the planters hard at work.
But, since we’re “Looking Back,” we’ll look at “modern” corn planting as it was practiced 150 years ago and described in the April 1873 issue of American Agriculturist.
Someone once said that “The corn crop must always be the sheet-anchor of American farming.” This is true, but the old plan of putting in the crop will not pay any longer. The [Native American] and the backwoodmen’s style belongs to a day long since past. Yet these obsolete styles of corn planting still linger in places where new ideas have not penetrated. And although the clamshell with which the Native American woman scooped out a hole for the seed, with a couple of small fish for fertilizer, and raised the hill over it, while her husband and master industriously looked on and ‘bossed’ the job, has gone out of date, the old-fashioned heavy hoe still remains in use and some farmers still scratch out holes and sow their corn patch amidst stumps and roots,
Last fall we visited Mr. Crozier, Beacon Stock Farm, Northport, Long Island, and were struck by the appearance and yield of his corn crop. A random acre measured out accurately was tested by husking a shock here and there and, figuring the average yield of them it appeared the produce of the acre was 260 bushels of ears.
The result was surprising and begs the question, how was this crop raised and could it be done by all other farmers? Manure and good cultivation of the soil were the only means used to achieve this result, nothing that any farmer couldn’t procure for himself. The soil was a light, sandy loam, a sod that had been plowed in the fall, subsoiled in the spring and perfectly well-harrowed. Then the drills were opened 3 ½ feet apart with a double moldboard plow. Into these was scattered well-rotted barn yard compost, hauled to the field in horse carts from which the manure was dropped. A man following each cart with a hoe smoothed the manure evenly in the drill as fast as he could walk.
The seed was dropped twelve inches apart by women and girls from the families of the farm laborers. The drills were closed and the seed covered by a light one-horse plow, two furrows being required, one on each side of the drill. The field was then harrowed with a chain harrow and rolled. Later cultivation was done with a hose-hoe, with which the rows were kept clean close up to the corn and very little hand-hoeing was necessary.
The engraving represents the whole operation of this method of putting in corn, except the harrowing and rolling. Each operation shown being done as fast as each worker can walk, it is quickly and cheaply performed. When the result is equal to 97 ½ bushels of shelled corn per acre, it is evident that this plan is much more profitable than that of growing 15 to 30 bushels by the methods in general use.
It surprises me that a progressive farm paper such as American Agriculturist was still promoting such a slow and labor-intensive method of planting corn as late as 1873. As early as 1857, a checkrow planter was introduced that was operated by jointed rods stretched across the field. In 1860, George W. Brown introduced a two-row planter with a second, small round seat between the seed boxes, upon which sat, usually, a small boy. Lines were made with a marking sled in one direction only, and the planter was driven at right angles to these lines. It was the boy’s duty to push a lever each time the planting shoes crossed one of these lines, dropping the seeds.
Inventors tried knotted rope to trip the planter, but the weather caused the rope to shrink or stretch, causing an inaccurate check. Finally, in 1864, a corn planter that used a knotted wire to trip the seed dropper was patented by two men from Aledo, Illinois, John Thompson and John Ramsey. Only one man was needed to operate this type of planter, which became a corn belt standard by the 1870s and continued in use through the 1950s, when chemical weed control methods eliminated the need for intensive cultivation. Mechanical corn harvesters also worked much better when the corn stalks were stretched out in drills rather than clumped in hills of three or four stalks.
So the 1873 ideas of “modern” sure ain’t “modern” today! What would Mr. Crozier of Beacon Stock Farm think if he could see one of today’s farmers planting GPS guided, arrow straight rows with a planter that sows forty-eight 30-inch rows of computer-monitored seed in each pass, each drill opened and fertilized, while each seed is precisely placed at the preset depth and distance apart and then covered, with each pass of the machine covering a strip of ground 120 feet in width.
Sam Moore
