Voi. xm. 



ROCHESTER, N. Y., DECEMBER, 1852. 



No. XII. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF TILLAGE — HORSE - HOEING WHEAT. 



If one were asked to name the practical farmer, -who, of all men from Adam down to 

 the present generatiorr, had most successfully studied the Philosophy of Tillage, he 

 might without hesitation claim the distinguished honor for Jethro Tull, the inventor 

 of drill husbandry, and the first to cultivate wheat by means of horse hoes. This 

 great man can be best be introduced to the reader, and the date indicated when seed- 

 drilling commenced, by allowing him to speak for himself: 



"About the year 1701, when I had contrived my drill for planting Bainfoin, I made use of it for 

 wheat, drilling many rows at once, which made the work more compendious, and performed it much 

 better than hands could, making them of a foot distance. Drilling in the seed and covering it did not 

 all amount to sixpence per acre expense, which was about ten times over-paid by the seed that was 

 saved ; for one bushel to an acre was the quantity drilled. There remained no need for hand work 

 but for the hoeing, and this did cost from half a crown to four shillings per acre. * * * 

 This was such an improvement to land, [the hand-hoeing of drilled wheat,] that when one part of a 

 strong whitish ground, all of equal goodness, and equally fallowed and tilled, was dunged and sown 

 in the common manner, and the other part thus drilled and hand-hoed, without dung, the hoed part 

 was not only the best crop, but the whole piece being fallowed the next year, and sown all alike, by 

 a tenant, the hoed part produced a so much better crop of wheat than the dunged part, that a stranger 

 would have believed, by looking on it, that that part had been dunged which was not^ and that part 

 not to have been dunged which really was." 



While engaged in drilling and hand-hoeing wheat, in the early part of the 18th 

 century, this illustrious farmer invented a valuable substitute for hand hoes which he 

 called a " horse hoe" as it was worked by horses or oxen, like a common plow or culti- 

 vator. At that early day, little arable land was artificially drained in England, and 

 wheat required to be grown on narrow and comparatively high beds to avoid damage 

 from an excess of water in the soil. Mr. Tull laid his summer fallows, or stubble 

 grounds, on which wheat was to be sown, in beds that were from five to six feet from 

 center to center, and quite crowning. Along the middle of each bed he drilled from 

 two to four rows of wheat — usually three — and eight or ten inches apart. At eight 

 inches distance between the rows, only sixteen inches would be occupied on the ground 

 by three rows, — one on each side of the center row and eight inches from it — leaving 

 four feet and eight inches between the wheat m one bed and that in another. This was 

 the widest central space ever allowed ; and thirty inches the least that would well 

 permit the use of the horse hoe, which might be called a cultivator, or shovel plow, or 

 two-share plow ; for during his forty years' practice and experimenting, the form and 

 character of his tillage implements were often changed and improved. 



The genius of this inventor prompted him to investigate and master the true princi- 

 ples of cultivating the earth. He plowed and hoed his growing wheat, and often stirred 

 the gi'ound, not because others tilled it, but to accomplish a clearly understood, and 

 truly philosophic purpose. What was this purpose ? It was not to imitate nature in 



