25.1.2: New Agricultural Tools

Agricultural Revolution: Mechanization

The mechanization and rationalization of agriculture was a key factor of the Agricultural Revolution. New tools were invented and old ones perfected to improve the efficiency of various agricultural operations.

The basic plough with coulter, ploughshare, and moldboard remained in use for a millennium. Major changes in design did not become common until the Age of Enlightenment, when there was rapid progress. The Dutch acquired the iron tipped, curved moldboard, adjustable depth plough from the Chinese in the early 17th century. It had the ability to be pulled by one or two oxen compared to the six or eight needed by the heavy-wheeled northern European plough. The Dutch plough was brought to Britain by Dutch contractors hired to drain East Anglian fens and Somerset moors. The plough was extremely successful on wet, boggy soil, but soon was used on ordinary land. In 1730,  Joseph Foljambe in Rotherham, England, used new shapes as the basis for the Rotherham plough, which also covered the moldboard with iron. Unlike the heavy plough, the Rotherham (or Rotherham swing) plough consisted entirely of the coulter, moldboard, and handles. By the 1760s Foljambe was making large numbers of these ploughs in a factory outside of Rotherham, using standard patterns with interchangeable parts. The plough was easy for a blacksmith to make and by the end of the 18th century it was being made in rural foundries. By 1770, it was the cheapest and best plough available. It spread to Scotland, America, and France. It may have been the first plough to be widely built in factories and the first to be commercially successful.

In 1789 Robert Ransome, an iron founder in Ipswich, started casting ploughshares in a disused malting at St. Margaret’s Ditches. As a result of a mishap in his foundry, a broken mold caused molten metal to come into contact with cold metal, making the metal surface extremely hard — chilled casting — which he advertised as “self sharpening” ploughs and received patents for his discovery. In 1789, Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies was producing 86 plough models for different soils.

James Small further advanced the design. Using mathematical methods, he experimented with various designs until he arrived at a shape cast from a single piece of iron, an improvement on the Scots plough of James Anderson of Hermiston. A single-piece cast iron plough was also developed and patented by Charles Newbold in the United States. This was again improved on by Jethro Wood, a blacksmith of Scipio, New York, who made a three-part Scots Plough that allowed a broken piece to be replaced.

The seed drill was introduced from China, where it was invented in the 2nd century BCE, to Italy in the mid-16th century. First attributed to Camillo Torello, it was patented by the Venetian Senate in 1566. A seed drill was described in detail by Tadeo Cavalina of Bologna in 1602. In England, it was further refined by Jethro Tull in 1701. Before the introduction of the seed drill, the common practice was to plant seeds by broadcasting (evenly throwing) them across the ground by hand on the prepared soil and then lightly harrowing the soil to cover the seed. Seeds left on top of the ground were eaten by birds, insects, and mice. There was no control over spacing and seeds were planted too close together and too far apart. Alternately seeds could be laboriously planted one by one using a hoe and/or a shovel. Cutting down on wasted seed was important because the yield of seeds harvested to seeds planted at that time was around four or five.Tull’s drill was a mechanical seeder that sowed efficiently at the correct depth and spacing and then covered the seed so that it could grow. However, seed drills of this and successive types were both expensive and unreliable, as well as fragile. They would not come into widespread use in Europe until the mid-19th century. Early drills were small enough to be pulled by a single horse, and many of these remained in use into the 1930s.

Jethro Tull’s seed drill (Horse-hoeing husbandry, 4th edition, 1762.

In his 1731 publication, Tull described how the motivation for developing the seed-drill arose from conflict with his servants. He struggled to enforce his new methods upon them, in part because they resisted the threat to their position as laborers and skill with the plough. He also invented machinery for the purpose of carrying out his system of drill husbandry, about 1733. His first invention was a drill-plough to sow wheat and turnip seed in drills, three rows at a time.

A threshing machine or thresher is a piece of farm equipment that threshes grain: removes the seeds from the stalks and husks by beating the plant to make the seeds fall out. Before such machines were developed, threshing was done by hand with flails and was very laborious and time-consuming, taking about one-quarter of agricultural labor by the 18th century. Mechanization of this process removed a substantial amount of drudgery from farm labor. The first threshing machine was invented circa 1786 by the Scottish engineer Andrew Meikle and the subsequent adoption of such machines was one of the earlier examples of the mechanization of agriculture.

Attributions

• New Agricultural Tools
  • “Plough.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “History of agriculture.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Jethro Tull (agriculturist).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jethro_Tull_(agriculturist). Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “British Agricultural Revolution.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Seed drill .” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_drill. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Threshing machine.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshing_machine. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Jethro_Tull_seed_drill_1762.png.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jethro_Tull_seed_drill_(1762).png. Wikimedia Commons Public domain.