"When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization"
Daniel Webster, American statesman, 1840
English farmer Jethro Tull (1674-1741) despaired at the waste of seeds that resulted from sowing them by scattering. Seeds would fall too close together, or onto stony ground, lie at differing depths, and plants would grow with no soil between them from which the crop could be weeded, tended, and harvested.
Tull's horsedrawn wooden seed drill improved on this situation and resulted in crop yields of up to eight times those where the seeds had been scattered. A shaped wooden drill dug an even groove of the right depth into the soil and seeds from the hopper mounted above it trickled into the groove, evenly spaced by the forward movement of the horse. Tull mounted three drills alongside each other in the machine, and so could plant three rows of seeds at a time, leaving space between these triple rows.
As a young man, Tull traveled in continental Europe in what were the early years of the Age of Enlightenment and was inspired by some of the scientific ideas he encountered. Although he is best known for inventing the seed drill, he also introduced the use of workhorses instead of cattle, invented a horsedrawn hoe, and developed the design of the plow in ways that are still in use today.
Some of his ideas proved controversial at the time, and his observation that crop nutrients are released from the soil by pulverization turned out to be misguided, but much of what he achieved established the foundations of modern agriculture in Britain, some decades before the start of the industrial and agricultural revolutions.
