Makers of Modern Agriculture

CHAPTER I. Jethro Tull : Founder of the Principles of Dry-Farming

JETHRO TULL : FOUNDER OF THE PRINCIPLES OF DRY-FARMING

"For the finer land is made by tillage the richer will it become and the more plants will it maintain."--Jethro Tull.

Eight miles to the north-west of Reading, on a lovely reach of the River Thames, lies the parish town of Basildon, in the County of Berkshire. Here, in the year 1674, was born the man who revolutionized British agriculture and laid the foundations for the "Conquest of the Desert." Yet, strange as it may seem, until the other day Tull's grave was unknown, and even now no monument marks the resting-place of this illustrious husbandman. His family was of ancient and honourable lineage, and he was heir to a competent estate. At seventeen he entered his name on the register of St. John's College, Oxford; but he did not proceed to a degree. Two years later he was admitted as a student of Gray's Inn, and was, in due course, called to the Bar. It is probable that Tull studied law not so much with the thought of taking it up seriously as a profession, but simply in order to better fit himself for a political career. Ill-health, however, made him turn his attention to farming. At the age of twenty-five he married a lady of good family, Miss Susanna Smith, of the County of Warwick, and then settled down to farm in Oxfordshire.

His first farm was Howberry, in the parish of Crowmarsh. The land of this farm was fertile and renowned for heavy crops of both wheat and barley. Here Tull lived and toiled for nine years, till at last his health broke down and he was ordered south to the milder climate of France and Italy. So he decided to sell a portion of his Oxfordshire estate and send his family to another farm in Berkshire named "Prosperous," situated in the parish of Shalbourne. After an absence of three years Tull returned to "Prosperous Farm"--a place for ever famous in the annals of agriculture. Here he lived for twenty-six years to the close of his strenuous, chequered career. Of this farm, Tull writes: "Situated on a little chalk on one side and heath on the other, the soil is poor and shallow--generally too light and too shallow to produce a tolerable crop of beans. This farm was made out of the skirts of others; a great part was a sheep down with a full reputation of poverty."

While in Europe Tull took special note of the deep and careful cultivation of the vineyards, where the tillage of the soil between the rows of the grape vines was made to take the place of manuring the land. On his return to England he tried this method at "Prosperous Farm," first with turnips and potatoes, and then with wheat. And by adopting this simple system with some few modifications of his own, he was enabled to grow wheat on the same fields for thirteen years continuously without the use of manure.

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It was on his farm of Howberry that Tull invented and perfected his drill in the year 1701. He has told the story of this invention in the pages of his great work. Finding his plans for growing sainfoin hindered by the distaste of his labourers for his new methods, he resolved to try to "contrive an engine to plant St. Foin more faithfully than such hands would do. For that purpose I examined and compared all the mechanical ideas that ever had entered my imagination, and at last pitched upon a groove, tongue, and spring in the sound-board of the organ. With these, a little altered, and some parts of two other instruments, as foreign to the field as the organ is, added to them, I composed my machine. It was named a drill, because, when farmers used to sow their beans and peas in channels or furrows by hand, they called that action drilling." And thus Tull's drill, taken from the rotary mechanism of his favourite organ, is the pioneer of all modern planters. His first invention was what he termed a drill-plough to sow wheat and turnip seed three rows at a time.

A leguminous plant cultivated for fodder.

It was this invention that led Tull to enunciate his first principle of tillage, namely, drilling. And it is the more amazing to reflect that even after this long lapse of time many farmers still persist in broadcasting their seed; for, as a recent authority working on the semi-arid lands of Montana writes: "Sowing broadcast is bad at any time, but in dry-farming it is suicidal." That the use of the drill has everywhere effected an enormous saving of seed is common knowledge; but let us hear what Tull has to say under this head: "Seed (sainfoin) was scarce, dear, and bad, and enough could scarce be got to sow, as was usual, seven bushels to an acre. I examined and thought the matter out, and found the greater part of the seed miscarried, being bad, or too much covered. I observed, and counted, and found when much seed had miscarried the crop was best." Here was his second principle, reduction of seed, or, as we now say, "thin-seeding," a practice which has been adopted by the dry-farmers of Utah with remarkable success.

At the present time it is customary to sow from 80-100 lb. of sainfoin seed per acre.

Moreover, Tull was an ardent advocate of the weedless field, and he saw, clearly enough, that dung was a serious menace to clean tillage, as the seeds of troublesome weeds were apt to be scattered far and wide over the farm. This led him to lay down as his third principle--the absence of weed. But he certainly never, as is sometimes said, condemned the use of manure. His experiments, however, proved beyond the shadow of doubt that good crops might be grown simply and solely by means of deep and constant tillage. So he says, angrily: "The vulgar in general believe that I carried my farmyard dung and threw it in a river. I have no river near; besides, my neighbours buy dung at a good price; but it is known I neither sell nor waste any dung. Against such lying tongues there is no defence."

Nevertheless, many years after his part was taken by none other than the great scientist of Rothamsted, the late Sir John Lawes, who wrote as follows:--

"Tull was quite an original genius and a century in advance of his time. I consider he has been most unjustly accused of not placing sufficient value upon farmyard manure; he advocated cleanliness, and saw that dung was a great carrier of weeds. To give some clear idea of the value of Tull's advocacy of drill-husbandry and the freedom from weed which can alone be obtained by the use of the drill, I may mention that so far as statistics will allow, I have ascertained the average yield of the wheat crop of the world, and I am able to say that the average yield is less than it is at the present time upon my permanent wheat land, after more than sixty years absolutely without manure. Here we have the result of Tull's three great principles--drilling, reduction of seed, and absence of weed. If he were alive now and were writing for the agriculture of the world, he would, I think, be quite justified in saying everything he said in regard to cleanliness and manure."

As a result of his studies, travels, and experiments, Tull published "The New Horse-Hoeing Husbandry: or an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation" in the year 1731. The great value of this work is that it is founded not upon mere theory, but upon actual experiments in the field. The fourth edition, which I have beside me, consists of 426 pages, with several plates, and 23 chapters which treat of the following subjects: Of Roots and Leaves; Of Food of Plants; Of Pastures of Plants; Of Dung; Of Tillage; Of Weeds; Of Turnips; Of Wheat; Of Smuttiness; Of Lucerne; Of Change of Species; Of Change of Individuals; Of Ridges; Old and New Husbandry; Of Ploughs; The Four-Coulter'd Plough; Of the Drill-Boxes; Of the Wheat-Drill: Of the Turnip-Drill; Of the Hoe-Plough; with an appendix concerning the making of the drill and the hoe-plough.

Tull's idea--which was that by tillage soils might be constantly and for ever reinvigorated or renewed--is summed up in his famous epigram, "tillage is manure." He believed that the earth was the true and the sole food of the plant, and, further, that the plant feeds and grows by taking in minute particles of soil. And since these particles are thrown off from the surface of the soil grains, it followed, therefore, that the more finely the soil was divided the more numerous the particles and the more readily the plant would grow. Although Tull's theories were wrong, his practice has been followed by all progressive farmers down to the present time. We now know that plants do not absorb particles of earth, but take in food in solution. Consequently, the more the particles of soil are broken up and refined, the more plant food the roots can absorb. In this volume, which must be counted an agricultural classic, Tull at once takes rank as the foremost preacher of his time of the gospel of deep and perfect tillage. And it is a work which, in the words of his great compeer, Arthur Young, will "unquestionably carry his name to the latest posterity."

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