TEE GENESEE FARMER. 



20'; 



ENGLISH PLOWS AND PLOWING. 



Judge French, of Exeter, N. H., who has, within 

 a year or two past, spent considerable time in 

 Europe, contributes a very readable article on 

 " English Plows and Plowing " to the last volume 

 of the Patent Office Report. We make a few 

 extracts : 



The plows made by Ransome & Simes, which I 

 saw on exliibition at the shows of the Royal Agri- 

 cultural Society, perhaps rank as high, at present, 

 as any plow in England. I was informed, at the 

 warehouses of the manufacturers, at Ipswich, that 

 their plow in common use as a seed plow, for two 

 liorses, weighs two hundred and eighty lbs,, and 

 its length twelve feet. It turns a furrow of eight 

 or nine inches in width, and five or six in depth, 

 which may be increased to one of ten by seven 

 inches. 



Actual experiment, at the warehouses in Boston, 

 shows the average weight of American plows de- 

 signed for the same work, with wheel and cutter, 

 to be about two hundred lbs., and their average 

 length about seven and a lialf feet. 



The English implement is entirely of iron, of fine 

 workmanship and finish, with two wheels, and is 

 much less simple in its structure than the American; 

 yet the American plow seems to be more firm and 

 strong than the other. Indeed, the extreme length 

 of the handles and of the beam of the English plow, 

 notvvitlistanding they are of iron, gives to a hand 

 accustomed to the American implement a feeling of 

 insecurity, as if the material were elastic, and would 

 not be stiff enougli to control the work were a stump 

 or fast rock to be encountered in the furrow. This 

 apprehension, however, is idle in most English fields, 

 which for a thousand years, perhaps, have felt the 

 pressure of the plowshare. 



But the difference between English and Ameri- 

 can plowing is fully as striking as that between the 

 plows. The worst-plowed field wliich I saw in a 

 summer's ramble through old England might be 

 said, literally, to appearance, to be done better than 

 the best-plowed field that can be found in a New 

 England farm. There seems to be no such thing in 

 England as a crooked or irregular furrow, but, how- 

 ever extensive the field, the work appears uniformly 

 as straight as a line could be laid down by a civil 

 engineer with liis instruments; and whether the 

 operation be really more thoroughly [lerformed than 

 witli us or not, it has at least the merit of being 

 accomplished precisely as the plowman desires. 



C)ur first impression upon these observations 

 would naturally be, that notwithstanding the Eng- 

 lish i)low is more clumsy and expensive than the 

 American, yet the former must have advantages 

 of structure, which, for use in old and thoroughly- 

 : tilled fields at least, more than compensate for these 

 objections. Yet this, however natural, would be 

 a hasty conclusion. 



Within twenty miles of Ipswich, where Ran- 

 50me's highly-finished plows are manufactured, in 

 i week which was spent on a farm and among 

 ntelligent farmers, in the county of Suffolk, an 

 entirely different plow was generally in use — an 

 inplement so ungainly, so large and ill-fashioned, 

 hat it seems as if it must have been disinterred 

 vith the stone coffins of the Norman knights, which 



occasionally turn up in that neighborhood, or have 

 been found in the antediluvian deposits of copro- 

 lites, for which Suflblk county is famous. 



The plow referred to is that which is usually 

 known in English books as the Norfolk plow, the 

 peculiarities of which are, that it has but one han- 

 dle, and that its beam, running upward at an angle 

 of about forty-five degrees from the level surface 

 of the ground, rests upon a frame-work supported 

 by an axle, upon which are two wheels of about 

 the size of the small wheels of a Yankee wagon. 



And thus we have the mystery of English supe 

 riority in jilowing solved, by the superior skill of 

 English plowmen, without necessarily admitting 

 the superiority of English plows. * * * 



The question, however, between English and 

 American plows of modern construction is still 

 open : Does the weight, or the length, or does any 

 other peculiarity of the English plow, upon the 

 whole, contribute to the utility of the implement <. 



It may be said that differences in the soil, or the 

 condition of the surface, render any such inquiry 

 fruitless to us, because a plow that may be suitable 

 and best for old fields in England, may be quite 

 unfit for the newly- cleared lands of the New World. 

 Such, manifestly, is the fact, but nmch of this New 

 World has already been converted into broad, clear 

 fields, and nmch of our best alluvial and prairie 

 land becomes, by a few years culture, as free from 

 obstruction as the oldest fields of Europe. 



It is a fact well known to practical farmers, that 

 the draft of the difierent plows, turning the same 

 width and depth of furrow, in the same field, and 

 performing the work in substantially the same 

 manner, varies so much as to be plainly practicable, 

 in its effect upon the team. The use of the dyna- 

 mometer, by which the power exerted upon the 

 plow, or, in a word, the draft can be actually 

 measured, has confirmed and made definite this 

 point, which before rested upon conjecture, or mere 

 estimate. It has thus been ascertained, by a trial 

 of ten different plows, each of a different make 

 from the others, that the difference in draft, in 

 performing precisely the same work, amounted to 

 forty-five per cent. The experiment was made in 

 turning a furrow with each plow, nine inches in 

 width by five in depth, in five different kinds of 

 soil, and carefully noting the results as shown by 

 the dynamometer. Taking the average of the five 

 trials, it appeared that, while the plow of lightest 

 draft required a power of three hundred and (me 

 lbs. to work it, the plow of the heaviest draft 

 required a power of tour hundred and forty-one 

 lbs. to perform precisely the same work, and the 

 other eight required the greatest possible variety 

 of power between these extremes. 



At a trial reported in the transactions of the 

 New York State Agricultural Society for 1843, p. 

 61, it was found that the average of resistance, or 

 the draft of twenty-four different plows, tested by 

 the dynamometer, ranged from two hundred and 

 ninety-eight to four hundred and eighty-tliree lbs., 

 showing that more than sixty per cent more power 

 was required to move one plow than the other, in 

 the work of turning a furrow twelve inches wide 

 by six inches deep. 



In another series of experiments, in the transac- 

 tions of the same Society for 1849, p. 559, in a trial 



