Since the wheat era, California agriculture has been defined by its highly mechanized farms. Brought on by the Gold Rush and the associated increased demand for food, wheat production quickly ramped up and by 1888, wheat was harvested on 3 million acres, mainly in the Central Valley (source: A History of California Agriculture by Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode @UCANR).

In the twentieth century, California farmers led the nation in the adoption of gasoline tractors, mechanical cotton pickers, sugar beet harvesters, tomato harvesters, electric pumps, and dozens of lesser-known machines. By 1958, all of California’s state crops were mechanically harvested -- and approximately half of the country’s agricultural machines were in California.

Sourced from the CARA collections and culled from a comprehensive timeline of California's agricultural history, developed in 1987 by Axel Borg, Distinguished Wine and Food Bibliographer at UC Davis Library, that sprang from his work, A Bibliography of California Experiment Station Publications: 1877 to 1975, this timeline traces the history of the development of agricultural mechanization in California, archived and available online in Calisphere.