What  aspect  of  farming  in  the  United  States  in  the  nineteenth  century  does&nbs

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 28 to 34.

During  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  production  of  food  and  feed  crops  in  the United States rose at an extraordinarily rapid rate. Com production increased by four and a half times, hay by five times, oats and wheat by seven times. The most crucial factor behind this phenomenal upsurge in productivity was the widespread adoption of labor-saving machinery by northern farmers. By 1850 horse-drawn reaping machines that cut grain were being introduced into the major grain-growing regions of the country. Horse-powered threshing machines to separate the seeds from the plants were already in general use.  However,  it  was  the  onset  of  the  Civil  War  in  1861  that  provided  the  great  stimulus  for  the mechanization  of  northern  agriculture.  With  much  of  the  labor  force  inducted  into  the  army  and  with grain prices on the rise, northern farmers rushed to avail themselves of the new labor-saving equipment. In 1860 there were approximately 80,000 reapers in the country; five years later there were 350,000.

After the close of the war in 1865, machinery became ever more important in northern agriculture, and  improved  equipment  was  continually  introduced.  By  1880  a  self-binding  reaper  had  been  perfected that not only cut the grain, but also gathered the stalks and bound them with twine. Threshing machines were also being improved and enlarged, and after 1870 they were increasingly powered by steam engines rather than by horses. Since steam-powered threshing machines were costly items-running from $ 1,000 to $4,000 - they were usually owned by custom thresher owners who then worked their way from farm to farm  during  the  harvest  season.  “Combines”  were  also  coming  into  use  on  the  great  wheat  ranches  in California  and  the  Pacific  Northwest.  These  ponderous  machines  -  sometimes  pulled  by  as  many  as  40 horses - reaped the grain, threshed it, and bagged it, all in one simultaneous operation.

The  adoption  of  labor-saving  machinery  had  a  profound  effect  upon  the  sale  of  agricultural operations  in  the  northern  states-allowing  farmers  to  increase  vastly  their  crop  acreage.  By  the  end  of century, a farmer employing the new machinery could plant and harvest two and half times as much com as a farmer had using hand methods 50 years before.

What  aspect  of  farming  in  the  United  States  in  the  nineteenth  century  does  the  passage mainly discuss?

• A. How labor-saving machinery increased crop production
• B. Why southern farms were not as successful as northern farms
• C. Farming practices before the Civil War
• D. The increase in the number of people taking up farming