Agricultural News
This Weeks Ag in the Classroom, Featuring Inventors of Agriculture!
Fri, 21 Aug 2020 09:39:33 CDT
Whether your kids are doing blended learning, online learning, or back in school, its always nice to have a few extra resources and fun things to do as a family! Oklahoma Ag in the Classroom has come up with some excellent daily activities you can do with your kids and family.
For this week's Ag in the Classroom we are celebrating Inventors! Did you know August is National Inventor's Month?? American agriculture owes much of its success to the innovative thinking of farmers looking for ways to solve problems and make farming easier. Thomas Jefferson was an avid farmer and inventor who saw a problem with the crude wooden plows used by farmers in his day.
They barely scratched the surface and merely loosened the topsoil, making it susceptible to washing away at the first hard rain. Jefferson's solution was the moldboard plow, which lifted and turned the sod. With this tool he could plow to a depth of about six inches. This enabled farmers to contour-ridge erodible fields, plow out shallow ditches, and ridge poorly drained flat lands.
Over 100 years later a farmer from Hooker, Oklahoma, invented another plow that helped control erosion and became the "Plow to Save the Plains." Fred Hoeme was a farmer living near Hooker during the Dust Bowl era who was concerned about wind erosion. Hoeme noticed that road equipment kicked up dirt clods that didn't blow around like the soil plowed using the usual plowing methods. He invented the chisel plow, which left the residue of previous crops exposed. This helped stabilize the soil and prevented the formation of surface crusts, which helped the soil take in and hold rainwater. Hoeme and his sons manufactured and sold about 2,000 plows from their farmstead.
Learn about more agricultural inventors in these two great resources below!
Red Dirt Ground Breaker
https://www.agclassroom.org/ok/resources_classroom/doc/reddirt.pdf
Technology in Ag Reader
https://www.agclassroom.org/ok/resources_classroom/readers/tech.pdf
Teachers, order your FREE resources by following this link!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjliZPYZ7FbJRVbMWrXXSR2nrrC4jdHF3rTTW8ipBy8W6yww/viewform?usp=send_form
And don't forget, Ag in the Classroom offers daily activities to do with your kiddos on their website, and their facebook page.
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