Technological innovation pushes agriculture toward a brave new world.

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Agriculture has been sprouting breakthrough technical innovations for a very long time. About 4,000 years ago, Egyptian farmers designed an ingenious contraption that allowed oxen to pull their wooden plows so they wouldn’t have to push them, leading to more efficient plantings. A couple of thousand years later, Chinese farmers started collecting all their organic wastes, fermenting them and spreading them over their fields to fertilize the soil.

In the 1830s, the seed drill was introduced in Europe, allowing farmers to plant larger fields in less time than by hand. At around the same time in Virginia, Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper, the world’s first mechanical grain harvester.

Then in the early 1920s, some Salinas lettuce growers started packing train freight cars with ice, allowing them to ship lettuce to the East Coast. That innovation helped kick-start a national love affair with the year-round salad and catapulted lettuce growers to the top of the Salinas Valley’s agricultural production pyramid.

In the late 1970s, researchers at Fresh Harvest in Salinas began to develop an innovation that would eventually secure lettuce’s position as king in the Salinas Valley: bagged salads. The idea involved several technological breakthroughs. Machines were developed to cut, clean and bag the produce. The bags themselves are technological wonders—three-ply devices that alternately protect the greens and let them breathe. By the late ‘90s the bagged salad craze was in effect, and by 2002, $4.2 billion worth of pre-washed, pre-cut bagged salads were being sold all across America. Most of this work is being performed here in the Salinas Valley.

In the Salinas Valley today, the wheels of innovation are spinning as fast as ever in all facets of the ag industry. There is a sense among local growers, industry leaders and even farm hands that local farms are on the cusp of a bountiful new epoch that will boost their profits and competitiveness for decades to come. These technological changes are being shaped by a slew of forces that extend far beyond the valley’s agriculture fields.

In addition to inventing new machinery, the local ag industry is pioneering breakthroughs on the biological and chemical fronts. At the USDA’s Agricultural Research Station in Salinas, some of the world’s top agricultural scientists are utilizing new microbiology tools, such as DNA fingerprinting, to identify new ag diseases, while other scientists continue the old tradition of crop breeding to create bigger and better fruits and vegetables. Also at the research station, researchers are providing urgent alternatives to the ag industry’s addiction to toxic pesticides. These advances could prove crucial to the region’s future.

Meanwhile, the unsentimental hand of Wal-Mart and other free market forces are introducing futuristic tracking technologies into the agricultural business.

Tanimura and Antle, long a bastion of innovation and a supplier of produce for Wal-Mart, is the first vegetable grower in the nation to experiment with radio frequency identification technology (RFID), which uses tiny, scannable computer chips in distributing ag products.

At the same time, political and economic forces are prompting local entrepreneurs to develop newer generations of automated harvesting machines that could in a decade wipe out thousands of farmworker jobs.

In the Salinas Valley, a true revolution is taking place in agriculture. While many of the changes like RFID and automated harvesting are high-tech in nature, today’s agricultural pioneers must still slog through old-fashioned elements like mud, rain, heat and unpredictable weather patterns that have been around since well before ancient Egypt.

At the heart of all of today’s changes, beyond the global forces of money and politics and sci-fi technologies, there lies an ancient human impulse of ambition that pushes today’s ag pioneers to do their jobs better than before, and better than their competitors.