Networking Basics
Networking Basics Agriculture has undergone yield-enhancing shifts in the past, including mechanisation before the second world war and the introduction of new crop varieties and agricultural chemicals in the green revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet yields of important crops such as rice and wheat have now stopped rising in some intensively farmed parts of the world, a phenomenon called yield plateauing. The spread of existing best practice can no doubt bring yields elsewhere up to these plateaus. The cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1794, reduced the time needed to separate cotton fiber from seed. In the 1830s, Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper helped modernize the grain-cutting process. At about the same time, John and Hiram Pitts introduced a horse-powered thresher that shortened the process of separating grain and seed from chaff and straw. Considerable research is being done on developing smart contact lenses that can collect health information or treat specific e...