While not directly impacting the farms themselves, the development of the printing press likely impacted their lives as it allowed books and knowledge to be written down and to travel much easier than it did before. While manuals of farming techniques would certainty help farmers, the fact that books were no longer limited to big libraries in wealthy places (and not being written only in Latin) was a much bigger deal in how farmers saw the universe. This allowed knowledge to be far more likely to reach a farmer in the first place. The social structure had changed, no longer limiting knowledge to the scholarly. How did you see the universe? A lot more clearly, and a lot differently than before as now all of this knowledge is more available to you.


As time passes by, there were revolutions. Industrial revolutions, to be precise. With the decline of feudalism and the guild system, there was a lot more freedom for many of your fellow farmers to instead go into other fields of endeavor, and enclosure often forced the smallest farms out of business. And agricultural efficiency continued to increase, meaning there were more and more surplus crops, meaning lower prices for them. But you were one of the remaining farmers, and you’d managed to buy out your former rival’s farms as they left the fields for industrial jobs. 

It’s not all bad news for the remaining farmers. The revolution has brought about the railway system that makes it vastly easier to transport your crops to the markets and allows transport to places farther away that was not possible before. The world of trading had never been more interconnected, and society had to adjust along with the times, and some segments found it wildly difficult. 

This era had a boon for farmers in the form of the steam engine. The tractor is so ubiquitous with farming that the tractor is often thought of as the symbol of agriculture, and steam powered tractors were around on farms well before the internal combustion engine became efficient enough to replace them. They were especially popular and important in the new world of America. Tractors improved farming efficiency and yet again made farming more efficient, to the point where yet again, the amount of farmers society needed to grow their crops decreased again. But while riding on your tractor, a farmer of this era might start realizing how much better you have it then your ancestors. Using the tractor is a lot faster than having to plow everything the old way. How did you see the universe? You might start wondering what innovations are ahead after the tractor.


Now, you’d have to go back to ancient Rome to find the previous slaveowner, but that changes when your family immigrates to this “new world” everyone’s talking about. The hip new form of discrimination “racism” makes it socially acceptable to own people and have them work your fields. And unlike in the Roman Empire, you had plenty of reason to be the hardest slave driver you could. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment, Jim Crowe laws and Eugenics kept this feeling alive and many people of color were still effectively enslaved on plantations in all but name. Things weren’t much better in Europe either. That is where Nazi Germany practiced the worst possible perversion of eugenics – preventing those races Hitler didn’t like from breeding, encouraging those of races he approved of to breed, and of course finally flat out extermination of races he hated. After all, those people were “unfit”. But the USA had it’s own eugenics as well, lasting into the 70s, long after the end of the Nazis and the Jim Crowe Era. While serfdom had been possible in medieval times, this was a social change that affected farmers in a drastically different way. How did you see the universe? In black and white.
