Let’s say you are an oat. Or better yet, a handful of oats. It’s  the 1920s, and things are going well in the country where you grew  up: the United States. World War I is in the rearview mirror, the  Great Depression is somewhere up ahead. The decade is roaring.

Your life is short--that’s the drawback--but it’s meaningful. You’ve grown up from seed. You’ve been scythed, dried, threshed, and winnowed, and now destiny approaches ... You’re about to be swallowed by a horse. One part of you will be ejected in a familiar form out the other end of the animal. Another will be altered into something more spectacular than a pile of horse sh*t. You’ll become energy, the stuff the horse uses all day working in the field. What a calling!

You’ve been a cornerstone of American agriculture for centuries. You helped build the country. When the United States was just a scattered bunch of colonies, you were one of the big three feed crops, along with corn and wheat, powering horses that plowed the fields. One newspaper article even called you the “gasoline of the 19th century.” Thank you for your service.

But there are dark clouds on the horizon. You’re about to be ... put out to pasture.

Earlier this century, 25 million horses and mules roamed American fields, and they were fueled by you, the little oat. In 1917, though, things took a turn: Henry Ford introduced a machine called the Fordson. It’s like the Model T but for tractors. The Fordson will eventually be described as the “iPad of tractors” or “the definitive, consumer-friendly genre-busting technology that immediately dominated a formerly desolate market.” (It being the 1920s, you obviously have no idea what an iPad is, and that’s OK. Let’s move on.)

The next year, in 1918, the company John Deere acquired Iowa’s Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company, marking another big step forward for the tractor. This moment in your life will later be understood as an uneasy one, the real beginning of your decline.

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