Probably the most profound of all human innovations was the development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago.
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Although small-scale cultivation occurred before that time, it took domestication of plants such as wheat and barley to transform communities from nomadic hunter-gatherers to permanent settlements and farming.
For most of history it was also extremely labour intensive, requiring crops to be managed by hand with implements such as scythes and sickles or animal-drawn ploughs.
All that changed with the arrival of mechanisation such as the reaper, invented in 1831. Cyrus McCormick and Obed Hussey both invented mechanical reapers, but McCormick was beaten by Hussey's patent in 1833.
The contraption was powered by two horses, with gears spinning knife blades.
A canvas conveyor then deposited the grain and stalks into rows.
Actually both McCormick and Hussey were beaten by Patrick Bell, a Scottish clergyman, who invented a reaping machine in 1826, which he demonstrated in 1828.
However Bell didn't file a patent and only a few were ever manufactured.
These early reapers were very loud and unreliable. They lacked a binding device of later machines and didn't make much of an impact.
A simpler device that required less energy was developed by John Ridley and others in South Australia around 1843. Their stripper only gathered the seed heads, leaving the stems in the field.
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Reaping machines as we know them arrived after the invention of steam and then diesel power.
The combine harvester incorporates four separate harvesting operations in a single process - reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing.
Another innovation arrived in 1891 with the "hillside levelling system" that allows a combine harvester to work on steep slopes.
Of course all this machinery requires energy, which means food systems now consume 15-30 per cent of global primary energy.
Historically, the limits to agriculture included soil fertility and water, but with industrialisation, energy has become central.
The race is now on to see if yields can be increased for a growing population while using less energy.
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