The twentieth century brought an enormous amount of technology developed for and applied to agriculture. These developments may be examined by highlighting the patterns of technology in three areas—infrastructure, public sector, and commercial factory—as if they were seen in cross section. The patterns are based on combined material and institutional forces that shaped technology.
A major development related to infrastructure concerns mechanization and transport. The combustion engine had a significant effect on agriculture and food. Not only did tractors replace animal and manual labor, but trucks and buses also connected farmers, traders, and markets. The development of cooling technology increased storage life and the distribution range for fresh products. Developments in packaging in general were very important. It was said that World War I would have been impossible without canned food. Storage and packaging is closely related to hygiene. Knowledge about sources and causes of decay and contamination initiated new methods of safe handling of food, affecting products and trade as well as initiating other innovations. In the dairy sector, for example, expanding markets led to the growth and mergers of dairy factories. That changed the logistics of milk collection, resulting in the development of on-farm storage tanks. These were mostly introduced together with compression and tube systems for machine milking, which increased milking capacity and improved hygiene conditions.
A different area of infrastructure development is related to water management. Over the twentieth century, technologies for irrigation and drainage had implications for improved ''carrying capacity'' of the land, allowing the use of heavy machinery. Improved drainage also meant greater water discharge, which in turn required wider ditches and canals. Water control also had implications for shipping and for supplies of drinking water that required contractual arrangements between farmers, governing bodies, and other agencies.
During the twentieth century, most governments supported their agricultural and food sectors. The overall interest in food security and food safety moved governments to invest in technologies that increased productivity and maintained or improved quality. Public education and extension services informed farmers about the latest methods and techniques. Governments also became directly involved in technological development, most notably crop improvement. Seed is a difficult product to exploit commercially. Farmers can easily put aside part of the harvest as seed for the next season.
Public institutes for plant breeding were set up to improve food crops-primarily wheat, rice, and maize-and governments looked for ways to attract private investment in this area. Regulatory and control mechanisms were introduced to protect commercial seed production, multiplication, and trade. Private companies in turn looked for methods to make seed reproduction less attractive to farmers, and they were successful in the case of so-called hybrid maize. The genetic make-up of hybrid maize is such that seeds give very high yields in the first year but much less in the following years. To maintain productivity levels, farmers have to purchase new seed every season. Developments in genetic engineering increased the options for companies to commercially exploit seed production.
Most private companies that became involved in genetic engineering and plant breeding over the last three decades of the twentieth century started as chemical companies. Genetic engineering allowed for commercially attractive combinations of crops and chemicals. A classic example is the herbicide Roundup, developed by the chemical company Monsanto. Several crops, most prominently soy, are made resistant to the powerful chemical. Buying the resistant seed in combination with the chemical makes weed control an easy job for farmers. This type of commercial development of chemical technologies and products dominated the agricultural and food sector over the twentieth century. Artificially made nitrogen fertilizers are one such development that had a worldwide impact. In 1908, Fritz Haber, chemist at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, fixed nitrogen to hydrogen under high pressure in a laboratory setting. To exploit the process, Haber needed equipment and knowledge to deal with high pressures in a factory setting, and he approached the chemical company BASF. Haber and BASF engineer Carl Bosch built a crude version of a reactor, further developed by a range of specialists BASF assigned to the project.
The result was a range of nitrogen fertilizer products made in a capital and knowledge-intensive factory environment. This type of development was also applied to creating chemicals such as DDT for control of various pests (dichloro-diphenyltrichloroethane), developed in 1939 by Geigy researcher Paul Mu¨ ller and his team. DDT may exemplify the reverse side of the generally positive large-scale application of chemicals in agricultural production-the unpredictable and detrimental effects on the environment and human health. The commercial factory setting for technology development was omnipresent in the food sector. The combination of knowledge of chemical processes and mechanical engineering determined the introduction of entirely new products: artificial flavorings, products, and brands of products based on particular food combinations, or new processes such as drying and freezing, and storing and packaging methods.
