The Father of Modern AgricultureSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay My father was a farmer, my grandfather was an inventor, those were the words of my grandmother, Lavonne Holland. She spoke proudly of my great-great-grandfather, inventor Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-1884). She also told me, “Not many people know who Cyrus McCormick is these days, but his memory will live on forever in the restless grain fields (Holland). The most important thing my grandmother told me was: In the generations around my great-grandfathers, planting grain depended solely on the ability of harvesters to harvest grain by hand (Holland ). This meant that the size of the crop was limited to what could be cut, and the failure of a small crop could have meant starvation for that family. However, all this would soon change, new mechanical inventions would help change the face of agriculture forever. This article will only begin to highlight some of the major contributions of Cyrus McCormick, the man commonly referred to as the father of modern agriculture. Cyrus Hall McCormick was born near Lexington, Virginia in 1809. One can only imagine how he spent his life. free time as a child on the 532-acre family farm known as the Walnut Grove (McCormick). He must have spent countless hours watching his father, Robert McCormick, tinker with the mechanical harvester of his dreams. Unfortunately for Robert, he will never turn his dream of a mechanical harvester into reality (McCormick). It didn't take young Cyrus long to realize his father's dream. He was determined to make his father's failure an accomplishment. With his gift of genius, he would turn this dream into reality and eliminate the fear of famine from the world. In 1831 his efforts were rewarded when he made the first demonstration of his mechanical reaper. He proved that he could harvest fifteen times more grain than by hand (McCormick). Despite all this, for many years Cyrus McCormick was unable to sell a single mechanical mower. Farmers had been harvesting by hand for generations and were bound by their customs, they were afraid of this new technology. After ten years of progress, McCormick had finally perfected his mechanical reaper. He now had so much confidence in his machine that he offered a guarantee on its productivity, and his business finally began to pick up (Brenner). McCormick soon realized that the future of agriculture would extend far beyond the Mississippi River, so in 1846 he moved his business from Virginia to the city of Chicago, where it is considerably developed (McCormick). McCormick still faced many daunting challenges. For many years he fought in court to defend his patent rights; he even lost a case against the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln (Brenner). Then, in 1871, he lost everything in the Chicago Fire (McCormick). At this point many men would have given up, sold their patent and retired. Here, McCormick gives us another lesson: he never wavered in the face of opposition and, more importantly, he never gave up on his dream of serving the people of his country. The invention of the mechanical reaper had accomplished only a small part of Cyrus McCormick's work. . He also warned the world that his mechanical reaper and the machines he knew would follow in the future would replace the horse and plow. McCormick implemented many innovative marketing and distribution techniques, still widely.