Advances in American Agriculture: The Mechanical Tomato Harvester as a Case Study

Technological advance in agriculture is not, in the United States today, the result of adopting some one tool or technique. Rather, it is adopting what has been called a of agricultural technology, which usually includes machines, improved (often hybrid) seeds and breeding stock, careful tillage, fertilizer, productive use of water through irrigation or drainage, and the application of chemicals to control weeds, fungi, and insects. The package idea is actually a systems approach to the problems of increasing agricultural productivity. Some of this appears in the histories of such major technological changes as hybrid corn, the cotton picker, and the mechanization of sugar beet production.1