The father of modern agriculture Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayMy father was a farmer, my grandfather was an inventor, these were the words of my grandmother, Lavonne Holland. He was speaking proudly of my great-great-grandfather, the inventor Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-1884). He also told me: Not many people know who Cyrus McCormick is these days, but his memory will live forever in the swaying cornfields (Holland). The most important thing my grandmother told me was: In the generations around that of my great-grandparents, the planting of wheat depended only on the ability of the harvesters to harvest the wheat 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 mean famine 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 known as the father of modern agriculture. Cyrus Hall McCormick was born near Lexington, Virginia, in 1809. One can only imagine how he spent his free time as a boy on the 532-acre family farm known as 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 would never make his dream of a mechanical mower (McCormick) a reality. It didn't take long for young Ciro to realize his father's dream. He was determined to make a result of his father's failure. Through his gift of genius he would make that dream a reality and eliminate the fear of famine from the world. In 1831 his efforts were rewarded when he held the first demonstration of his mechanical reaper. He demonstrated that he could harvest fifteen times more grain than by hand (McCormick). Despite all this, for many years Cyrus McCormick failed to sell a single mechanical harvester. The farmers had been harvesting by hand for generations and were tied to their customs, they were afraid of this new technology. After ten years of further progress McCormick had finally perfected his mechanical harvester. He now had so much confidence in his machine that he offered a guarantee on its productivity and his business finally began to recover (Brenner). McCormick quickly 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 grew enormously (McCormick). McCormick still faced many great challenges, for many years he fought in court defending 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 the 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 would replace the horse and plow in the future. McCormick established many innovative marketing and distribution techniques that are still widely used today (McCormick). He was willing to sell for a small cash advance payment, because he knew his harvester.