A Century of Potato Harvesting
A brief history of the evolution of spud harvest
10/14/20262 min read
The Pugh Digger
When you're wandering or commuting through the county, witnessing spud harvest underway with its million dollar equipment picking up sixteen rows at a time and filling trucks in but a couple minutes, consider a century ago when one-row machines pulled by horses (see the attached photos) were a fixture of the agricultural landscape.
At the time, those one-rows were seen as quite an improvement. Prior to their arrival, a farmer harvested only as many potatoes as could be dug by hand. With Isaac Hoover's invention he could harvest hundreds of bushels a day. His wasn’t the first mechanized harvester (models had been available since the late 1860s) but it became one of the most popular.
Hoover, an Ohio farmer, produced his county's largest potato harvest. But after years of tedious harvests by hand, by the winter of 1884-1885, he constructed his first digger and used it to harvest his crop. He patented the machine soon after, his application reading “mechanisms for digging or removing the tubers from the ground, sifting and separating them from the earth, stones, weeds, and stalks, and delivering them at the rear of the machine, on one side, into a receptacle or upon the ground to be gathered up; the weeds are then discharged from the machine on the opposite side from the delivery of the potatoes.”
Horses pulled his ground-powered potato digger, the cleated wheels rotating and powering the machinery. It could harvest up to 500 bushels – a full 8 acres – of potatoes per day. In 1886, Hoover and his brother-in-law produced 50 potato diggers. He formally introduced his invention to the world at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and in 1898 received a gold medal for the digger at the Trans-Mississippi & International Expo in Omaha. Over time, his digger became immensely popular and was considered by many to be the best available on the market, being regarded as reliable, well built and sturdy. By 1914, the Hoover Company employed nearly 100 workers who produced about 5,000 machines annually, shipping them worldwide.
In 1915, Hoover introduced a 1-row potato planter—a 2-row came just two years later.—and started producing potato sorters, seed cutters, and fertilizer attachments for potato planters. As tractors became more common, Hoover enhanced the digger, mounting a gasoline engine on it in 1913 to take the load off the horses pulling it. Deere & Co. from Moline, Ill., became the sole distributing agent for all Hoover products and bought Hoover out in 1926.
This post pulls heavily from Lisa Yako's "The March of Progress" (https://theclio.com/entry/105611)
