More on Tull

[Michael S. Habiby]

The first factory for making plows was established in England in 1783.

Though the problem of mechanizing harvest work was not solved until the 19th
century, a few fairly simple threshing machines were designed and put in use
by 1800. Similarly, a variety of machines for such tasks as preparing animal
feed, chopping turnips, and cutting chaff were designed and used.

The English gentleman Jethro Tull made important contributions during this
period, among them the horse-drawn hoe and the seed drill. To save expensive
hand labour, Tull designed and fabricated horse-drawn hoes that destroyed
the weeds and kept the soil between the rows in good crumbly (friable)
condition. Tull believed that friable soil would supply all the nutrients a
plant required, and he was so convinced of his theory that he planted wheat
in rows spaced widely enough to allow for horse hoeing while the plant was
growing. Tull also believed that placing the seed into the ground in small
holes (drilling) would permit a much lighter rate of seeding than hand
broadcast methods and still get high yields. To place the seeds, he designed
and used a seed drill.

Tull was not the first man to invent a seed drill. A seed dropper,
consisting of a tube attached to a plow through which seed could be dropped
by hand at regular intervals, had been attached to an ancient Babylonian
plow. A similar system, but with two tubes behind two plowshares set in a
rectangular frame, was employed in 17th-century China, and probably at a
very much earlier date. An Italian described a modern form of seed drill in
the late 16th century. An Austrian, Locatelli, described a sembrador, or
seed drill attached to a plow, which was either used or proposed for use in
Spain. After Tull, inventors were numerous, and, at the end of the 18th
century, the drilling of seed, though not commonplace, was accepted.
Throughout this period, however, the ordinary farmer continued to prepare
his seedbed by plowing three times a year, occasionally more, and
broadcasting seed by hand and harrowing it in. All these techniques were
thousands of years old.

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