Employment of state-of-the-art feed lots and modern science and veterinary medicine along with favorable climatic conditions allowed ranchers in California and Arizona to achieve significant efficiencies in converting feed to cattle weight. In the 1960s, larger commercial feedlots started to become more prevalent in the Southwest and in the Corn Belt.Thus, as in other cases, technologies developed in California spread to reshape agricultural practices in other regions.A hallmark of California agriculture since the wheat era has been its highly mechanized farms. Nineteenth-century observers watched in awe as cumbersome steam tractors and giant combines worked their way across vast fields. In the twentieth century, California farmers led the nation in the adoption of gasoline tractors,mechanical cotton pickers, sugar beet harvesters, tomato harvesters, electric pumps, and dozens of less well-known machines. The story of agricultural mechanization in California illustrates the cumulative and reinforcing character of the invention and diffusion processes. Mechanization of one activity set in motion strong economic and cultural forces that encouraged further mechanization of other, sometimes quite different, activities.Specialized crops and growing conditions created demands for new types of equipment. Protected by high transportation costs from competition with large firms located in the Midwest, a local farm implement industry flourished by providing Pacific Coast farmers with equipment especially suited to their requirements. In many instances the inventors designed and perfected prototypes that later captured national and international markets. Grain combines, track-laying tractors, giant land planes,plastic garden planters tomato pickers, and sugar beet harvesters, to name but a few, emerged from California’s shops. Several factors contributed to mechanization. In general, California farmers were more educated and more prosperous than farmers in many areas of the country.

These advantages gave them the insight and financial wherewithal to support their penchant for tinkering. Nowhere was this more evident than on the bonanza ranches, which often served as the design and testing grounds for harvester prototypes. The large scale of many California farms allowed growers to spread the fixed cost of expensive equipment. The scarcity of labor in California meant relatively high wage rates and periods of uncertain labor supply. The climate and terrain were also favorable. Extensive dry seasons allowed machines to work long hours in near-ideal conditions, and the flat Central Valley offered few obstacles to wheeled equipment. In the cases of small grains and cotton, mechanization was delayed in other regions of the country because free-standing moisture damaged the crops. Such problems were minimal in California. All things considered, the state’s climatic and economic conditions were exceptionally conducive to mechanization. As an index of the level of mechanization, Figure 4 shows the real value of implements per farm in California and other major regions. Over the years 1870 to 1930 the average value of implements per California farm was about double the national average. The new generation of farm equipment of the nineteenth century relied increasingly on horses and mules for power. Horses on any one farm were essentially fixed assets. A stock of horses accumulated for a given task was potentially available at a relatively low variable cost to perform other tasks. Thus, once a farmer increased his pool of horses, he was more likely to adopt new power-intensive equipment. For these reasons, an examination of horses on California farms will yield important insights into the course of mechanization. In 1870 the average number of horses and mules on a California farm was almost three times the national average, and the number of horses and mules per male worker was more than twice the national average. Throughout the nineteenth century, California farmers were using an enormous amount of horsepower.California was a leader in the early adoption of tractors. By 1920, over 10 percent of California farms had tractors compared with 3.6 percent for the nation as a whole. In 1925, nearly one-fifth of California farms reported tractors, proportionally more than in Illinois or Iowa, and just behind the nation-leading Dakotas.

These figures actually understate the power available in California, because the tractors adopted in the West were, on average, substantially larger than those found elsewhere.In particular, western farmers were the predominant users of large track-laying tractors, which were invented in California. The state’s farmers were also the nation’s pioneers in the utilization of electric power. The world’s first purported use of electricity for irrigation pumping took place in the Central Valley just before the turn of the century. Consistent data on rural electricity use are not available until 1929. At that time, over one-half of California farms purchased electric power compared with about one-tenth for the United States as a whole.One of the best proxies for electrification is the number of agricultural pumps. Over the period 1910 to 1940, the state accounted for roughly 70 percent of all of the nation’s agricultural pumps.The abundant supply of power on California farms encouraged local manufacturers to produce new types of equipment, and in turn, the development of new and larger implements often created the need for new sources of power. This process of responding to the opportunities and bottlenecks created by previous technological changes provided a continuing stimulation to innovation. Tracing the changes in wheat farming technology will illustrate how the cumulative technological changes led to a distinctly different path of mechanical development in the West as compared to that which occurred elsewhere.Almost immediately after wheat cultivation began in the state, its farmers developed a distinctive set of cultural practices. Plowing the fertile California soil was nothing like working the rocky soils in the East or the dense sod of the Midwest. In California, ranchers used two, four, and even eight-bottomed gang plows, cutting just a few inches deep.In the East, plowing one-and-one-half acres was a good day’s work in 1880. In most of the prairie regions, two-and-one-half acres were the norm. In California, it was common for one man with a gang plow and a team of eight horses to complete six to ten acres per day. The tendency of California’s farmers to use larger plows continued into the twentieth century. After tractors came on line, the state’s farmers were also noted for using both larger models and larger equipment. This pattern influenced subsequent manufacturing and farming decisions.

The preference for large plows in California stimulated local investors and manufacturers who vied to capture the specialized market. As evidence of the different focus of their innovative activity, the U.S. Agricultural Commissioner noted that “patents granted on wheel plows in 1869 to residents of California and Oregon largely exceed in number those granted for inventions of a like character from all the other states of the Union.”Between 1859 and 1873 California accounted for one-quarter of the nation’s patenting activity for multi-bottom plows. By way of contrast, the state’s contribution to the development of small single-bottom plows was insignificant.The experience with large plows directly contributed to important developments in the perfection and use of listers, harrows, levelers,square plant containers and earth-moving equipment. The adoption of distinctive labor-saving techniques carried over to grain sowing and harvest activities. An 1875 USDA survey showed that over one-half of mid-western farmers used grain drills, but that virtually all California farmers sowed their grain.California farmers were sometimes accused of being slovenly for using sowing, a technique which was also common to the more backward American South. However, the use of broadcast sowers in California reflected a rational response to the state’s own factor price environment, and bore little resemblance to the hand-sowing techniques practiced in the South. Among the broadcasting equipment used in California were advanced high-capacity end gate seeders of local design. By the 1880s improved models were capable of seeding up to 60 acres in one day. By contrast, a standard drill could seed about 15 acres per day and a man broadcasting by hand could seed roughly 7 acres per day.The use of labor-saving techniques was most evident on the state’s bonanza wheat ranches, where some farmers attached a broadcast sower to the back of a gang plow and then attached a harrow behind the sower, thereby accomplishing the plowing, sowing, and harrowing with a single operation.California wheat growers also followed a different technological path in their harvest operations by relying primarily on headers instead of reapers. This practice would have important implications for the subsequent development of combines in California. The header cut only the top of the straw. The cut grain was then transported on a continuous apron to an accompanying wagon. Headers typically had larger cutting bars and, hence, greater capacity than reapers, but the most significant advantage was that headers eliminated the need for binding. The initial cost of the header was about 50 to 100 percent more than the reaper, but its real drawback was in humid areas where the grain was not dry enough to harvest unless it was dead ripe. This involved huge crop risks in the climate of the Midwest, risks that were virtually nonexistent in the dry California summers. For these reasons California became the only substantial market for the header technology. The header technology evolved in an entirely different direction from the reaper, leading directly to the development in California of a commercial combined harvester.

From the starting point of the header, it was quite simple and natural to add a thresher pulled along its side. There had been numerous attempts in the East and Midwest to perfect a machine that reaped and threshed in one operation. Among those that came closest to succeeding was Hiram Moore’s combine built in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1835. But in the humid Midwest, combining suffered from the same problems with moisture that had plagued heading. In 1853 Moore’s invention was given new life when a model was sent to California, where it served as a prototype for combine development.After several decades of experimentation in California, workable designs were available by the mid-1880s and the period of large-scale production and adoption began. Most of the innovating firms, including the two leading enterprises—the Stockton Combined Harvester and Agricultural Works and the Holt Company—were located in Stockton. During the harvest of 1880 “comparatively few” machines operated in California, and agricultural authorities, such as Brewer and Hilgard, clearly suggest that even those machines should be considered as experimental. In 1881 about 20 combines were under construction in Stockton.By 1888, between 500 and 600 were in use.The first truly popular model was the Houser, built by the Stockton Combined Harvester and Agricultural Works. In 1889, its advertisements claimed that there were 500 Houser machines in use, and that they outnumbered all of the competitors put together.Soon thereafter, machines in the Holt line overtook the Houser. The innovative products of the Holt company, which included in 1893 the first successful hillside combine, became dominant on the West Coast. By 1915 Holt’s advertisements boasted that over 90 percent of California’s wheat crop was harvested by the 3,000 Holt combines in the state.It is important to recognize that the adoption of combine-harvesters east of the Rockies was only in its infancy at this date. Combine models that eventually were adopted in the Midwest and Great Plains were considerably smaller than West Coast machines. The primary reasons for the differences were undoubtedly cost and scale considerations, but the prejudice in the East that large teams of horses were unworkable and the lack of practice probably played important roles.In California the opposite attitudes were said to prevail. The Pacific Rural Press boasted “f one man could drive all the mules in the State it would be the acme from one point of view.”California farmers had gradually developed their ability to manage large teams as a result of their experience with gang plows and headers.The difficulties associated with controlling large teams induced Holt and others to perfect huge steam tractors to pull their even larger harvesters. While steam-driven combines never came into vogue, these innovative efforts did have one highly important by-product—the track-laying tractor. The first practical track-laying farm tractors were initially developed to operate on the soft soil of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.Although the crawlers were first designed to solve a local problem, this innovation was of global significance. The Caterpillar Tractor Company would build larger, more powerful equipment that rapidly spread throughout the world.