s of cattle and sheep were developed. Most common was the Guernsey cattle breed. Land enclosure was increasingly practiced in the 18th century, enabling individual landowners to determine the disposition of cultivated land and pasture that previously had been subject to common use.Crop rotation was more readily practiced outside the village strip system inherited from the manorial period. In England, where scientific farming was most efficient, enclosure brought about a fundamental reorganization of land ownership. From 1660 large landowners had begun to aid to their properties, frequently at the expense of small independent farmers. By the mid-19th century the agricultural pattern was based on the relationship between the landowner, dependent on rents; the farmer, producer of crops; and the landed laborers, the hired hand of American farming folklore (What Life Was Like). Drainage brought more land into cultivation and farm machinery was introduced. It is not possible to fix a clear decade of events as the start of the agricultural revolution through technology. Among the important advances were the purposeful selective breeding of livestock and the spreading of limestone on farm soils. Mechanical improvements in the traditional wooden plow began in the mid- 1600s with the small iron points fastened onto the wood with strips of leather. In 1797, Charles Newbold, a blacksmith in Burlington, New Jersey, introduced the plow in the 1830s and manufactured it in steel. Other notable inventions included the seed drill of English farmers Jethro Tull, developed in the early 1700s and advanced for more than a century; the reaper of American Cyrud McCormick in 1831; and numerous new horse-drawn threshers, cultivators, grain and grass cutters, rakers, and corn shellers. By the late 1800s, steam power was oftentimes used to replace animal power in drawing plows and in operating threshing machinery (Timelines of the Ancient World).The de...
