Passage Five

The agricultural revolution in the nineth century involved two things the invention of labor-saving machinery and the development of scientific agriculture. Labor-saving machinery naturally appeared first where labor was scarce. "In Europe", said Thomas Jefferson," the object is to make the most of their land, labor being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labor, land being abundant." It was in America, therefore, that the great advances in nine-th-century agricultural machinery first came. At the opening of the century, with the exception of a crude plow, farmers could have carded practically all of the existing agricultural implements (家具) on their backs; by 1860, most of the machinery in use today had been designed in an early form. The most important of the early inventions was the iron plow. As early as 1790 Charles Newbold of New Jersey had been working on the idea of a cast-iron plow and spent his entire fortune in introducing his invention. The farmers, however, would have none of it, claiming that the iron poisoned the soil and made the weeds grow. Nevertheless, many people devoted their attention to the plow, until in 1869 James Oliver of South Bend, Indiana, turned out the first chilled-steel (冷淬钢) plow.

What point is the author by stating that farmers could carry nearly all their tools on their backs（）