Jethro Tull’s Horse-hoeing Husbandry

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. My comfort TV viewing lately has been those BBC historic farm shows that came out in the two thousands and the twenty teens. I haven't actually seen the first one, which is called Tales from the Green Valley. I'm not sure if that's streaming anywhere, but I have made my way through Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm and Tudor Monastery Farm. If you've never seen these, they are filmed over a year at a living history site. There's a historian named Ruth Goodman and then archaeologist. They started out with Peter Ginn and Alex Langland's and then Tom Pinfold replaced Alex in Tutor Monastery Farm. So in each of these series they try to recreate what life was like for British farmers at a particular place in time. Uh. And they have been like my downtime viewing for the past little stretch. So watching these in the order that they came out means that I had seen a lot of fields being planted using a seed drill, which is a machine that digs a place for the seeds to grow, and it drops the seeds into that place and then it covers them up. And then I got to Tutor Monastery farm, which is set before the seed drill was used in Britain, and there's this whole scene where Peter and Tom are getting ready to sow their seeds by manual broadcasting, which just means flinging them out by hand into the field, and the narrator says something about how this is how it was done before Jethrow Tull invented the seed drill. And I had one of those records scratch mental moments because I think of Jethrow Tull as the name of a band, and while I probably, uh, you know, assumed that this band was named for a person, I definitely did not recall that the person was an eighteenth century gentleman farmer often credited with inventing the seed drill. So that became what I had to do a podcast on next. He could or could not play the jazz flute. We don't know. We actually don't know jeff Row Tull's birth date, but he was baptized on March thirty, sixteen seventy four, in Basilton, Berkshire, England. His parents were Dorothy and Jethro Tull, and they were an established farming family, but not a wealthy one. In fact, the Greater Tull family had a range of legal and financial problems, some of them connected to their work as land agents for other people. The elder jeth Row Tull also had an uncle who was also named jeff Row Tull. This other jeff Row Tull was married to a woman named Mary, and at various points j e Throw, husband of Dorothy, and Jethrow, husband of Mary, transferred lands to one another as they tried to keep it from being seized in legal action or as payment for a debt. It is all a confusing enough tangle that some early biographies thought that these two older Jethrow Tells were the same person, and a paper that I read that tried to sort all of this out used Roman numerals to differentiate them, even though they were not really Jethrow Tull. The first, second and third uh, the agriculturist Jethro Tull, that is, the Jethro Tull who this episode is about, did not disclose very much about his personal life after becoming very well known for his farming methods. Some of this is probably connected to his family history. All those debts and lawsuits would have been embarrassing and they also kind of left him on financially shaky ground. He also got a lot of criticism, which we will get to, which seems to have made him just for luck to talk about himself. So what we know about his life is mostly pieced together from his writing. Jethro Tull attended St John's College, Oxford, but there's no evidence that he earned a degree that In sixteen ninety three he was admitted as a student at Gray's Inn, which is one of the four ends of court in London. He was going to study law. This was in preparation for a career in politics, but his family's legal and debt drama combined with his own chronic illness to derail that plan. As is often the case with historical figures, we don't know the details of his illness, but it's often described as a respiratory disorder, possibly tuberculosis. Tull was called to the bar in sixteen ninety nine, but rather than practicing law, he started working on one of the tolls farms in Oxfordshire. He also got married that year to a woman named Susannah Smith on October. The pair would go on to have five children, four honors and one son. Although jeth Row Tull is most associated with the seed drill, his methods went beyond just using a machine to plant seeds instead of broadcasting them by hand. Francis Forbes was a follower of Tull's reforms, and here's how he described the quote old husbandry pre Tull. This is from the extensive practice of the new husbandry exemplified on different sorts of land for a course of years, in which the various methods of plowing, hoeing, and every other process and agriculture recommended by Mr Tull, etcetera are considered. Forbes published that in six he wrote quote in the old husbandry, the tillage, namely the plowing and harrowing is done first, the plowing to open the land, and the harrowing to make it fine and get out the weeds. Dong or other manure is then spread upon the land which is plowed in, and then the seed, as of wheat or other corn, is sown by hand broadcast which is covered by the plow or harrow. Nothing more is usually done till harvest, except weeding when the weeds are grown up pretty large. A lot of these basic steps had been documented in Virgil's Georgics, which were written in the first century b c. And that is a very long, multi volume work of verse that praised the agricultural life of rural Italy and also offered instruction on subjects like planting and tending fields and orchards, keeping bees, and raising livestock. It was definitely a didactic work, but there was debate over the centuries about whether Virgil had really intended it as a step by step set of instructions for agriculture. Regardless, by the time Tull started farming, a lot of Virgil's poetic recommendations were being taken for granted as the right way to farm. They had been incorporated into other farming and agricultural manuals. In addition to the application of manure that Forbes mentioned, there was also the burning of the stubble that was left on the field at the end of the harvest and allowing the land to periodically lie fallow. It was, in Tool's words, quote accident, not choice, that made me a farmer or rather many accidents which could not then possibly be foreseen. Those many accidents meant that he had a farm that quote I could not well dispose of, And it being about the time when plow servants first began to exalt their dominion over their masters, so that a gentleman farmer was allowed to make but little profit of his arable lands, and almost all mine being of that sort, I resolved to plant my whole farm with Saint Foyn. If you think that he sounds a little resentful of his workers in this passage, you're correct. He seems to have resented needing to hire people to do anything so same. Foin is a legume that was grown for forage, and at this point same point, seed was almost exclusively important to England, and this made it expensive and kind of hard to get an in Talls experience, once a farmer did get it, a lot of it just did not sprout. So Tall started trying to figure out how to get the biggest result out of the smallest amount of seed, including examining how deeply the seeds should be planted and how much room they needed to grow. He later wrote, quote I observed in several fields of same coin sewn with that proportion of seed that in those parts of them which produced the best crop there was, as I counted them when the crop was taken off, but about one plant for each square foot of surface. And yet the number of seeds and seven bushels sewn on each acre being calculated, amounted to one hundred and forty to each square foot. And what was yet more observable in other parts of the same fields, where a much less number of seeds had miscarried, the crop was less. Then after I had learned perfectly how to distinguish good seeds from bad, and had by many trials found that scarce any even of the best, would succeed unless covered at a certain depth, especially in my strong land. In other words, rather than throwing large numbers of seeds to land randomly, Tull wanted to take a more controlled approach, with fewer seeds sorted to include only the best ones. I mean, it seems like, based on how much seed people were using and where the plants are growing the best, they were using like a hundred and forty times more seeds than was necessary. So to try to make this whole process more controlled, quote, I employed people to make channels, and so a very small proportion therein and cover it exactly. This way succeeded to my desire, and was in seed and labor but a fourth part of the expense of the common way. And yet the ground of seed was better planted ten acres being so well done, I did not doubt, but a thousand might have been as well done in the same manner. This sounds like a success. But the next season, when Tull instructed his workers to once again make channels and carefully so the seeds in them quote, I discovered that these people had conspired to disappoint me for the future, and never to plant a row tolerably well. Again, perhaps jealous that if a great quantity of land should be taken from the plow, it might prove a diminution of their power, I was forced to dismiss my laborers, resolving to quit my scheme unless I could contrive an engine to plant sainfoin more faithfully than such hands would do. In other words, jeth roats All concluded that his workers were doing a bad job just despite him, so he fired them and decided he would make a machine to sew his same point seed. Instead. We will talk more about that after a sponsor break. Jeffre Tull was not the first person to try to use some kind of a tool or a machine to plant his crops. I should also know, like we're talking about ways to sow large fields of one crop, not like a little garden, like a little kitchen garden, where you would have a couple of rows of different things, like things that require lots of seeds. Basic tools like planting sticks used to prepare the soil and plant the seeds and dig out root crops. Those have existed around the world for millennia. There's evidence of early seed drills in China as far back as the second century, but it is not clear when or whether those might have been introduced into Europe. The first setting boards, which used spaced holes to distribute the seeds more evenly, those day back to at least sixteen oh one. John Worlidge included a design for a seed drill in his systema Agriculture in sin but it doesn't appear that he ever actually managed to build a working model. The same is true for several seed drill designs that were patented in various parts of Europe in the late seventeenth century. When Tull decided to contrive an engine to plant his same coin, he thought about other devices that he was already familiar with, writing quote, when I was young, my diversion was music. I had also the curiosity to acquaint myself thoroughly with the fabric of every part of my organ, but as little thinking that ever I should take from thence the first rudiments of a drill. After dismissing his workers for not sowing the seeds. To his satisfaction, Tull quote examined and compared all the mechanical ideas had ever entered my imagination, and it last pitched upon a groove, tongue, and spring in the soundboard of the organ. With these a little altered, and some parts of two other instruments, as far into the field as the organ is added to them, I composed my machine. It was named a drill because when farmers used to sew their beans and peas into channels their furrows by hand, they called that action drilling. Tell first used this machine in seventeen oh one, and, as he wrote decades later, quote, it planted that far much better than hands could have done, and many hundred acres besides, and thirty years experience shows that same foin thus planted brings better crops and lasteth longer than son same foin. So this device had a grooved, rotating cylinder that would carry the seeds from a hopper above to a funnel underneath. The cylinder was also the axle for the drills wheel, so it turned as the wheels did. There was a plow towards the front of the drill that created a channel for the seeds to drop into, and then there was a harrow in the back of the drill and that covered the seeds up. So this meant that the seeds were dropped in a straight line to a specific depth and then covered all at once, as long as your horse was going in a straight line while pulling it. So it's Hall's words, his drill did this quote with great exactness and expedition. Tall made various refinements to the device itself and how it was used, ultimately ending up with a process in which two or three rows of plants were planted between eight and ten inches apart. Those two or three rows were on ridges that were four to six ft apart, leaving enough room for a horse to walk down on the field without trampling anything. In Tull's mind, this was just a huge improvement over manually broadcasting seeds. Even if somebody was pretty good scattering seeds by hand, there was typically too much seed in some places and too little in others. If the field was furrowed ahead of time to accommodate the seeds, some of the seeds landed in the furrows, but other ones didn't. Seed that was too deep in the soil might not grow as well, and if it was too shallow it was more likely to be eaten by birds. Planting in rows also made it easier to get into the field to check on the crop and to remove weeds and to harvest, and as Tull noted, a field that was fully planted with this method required far fewer seeds than manual broadcasting did. But other farmers who saw what he was doing, a lot of them thought he was letting a lot of plantable land go to waste by leaving these four to six foot gaps in between his rows. Tell farmed in Oxfordshire for about ten years before moving to Prosperous Farm in Shelburne, Berkshire, which was another farm that had been in the Tall family, and sometime in the early seventeen teens he traveled to Italy and France for the sake of his health. He returned to England after somewhere between two and four years, but these dates are again unclear, with the only clue to try to pin it down being the baptism of his daughter Sarah in October of set Something That's whole noticed while in Italy and France was how carefully the vineyards were planted and managed. The soil in between the rows was carefully tilled to the point of being pulverized, and workers meticulously hoed the earth around the plants as well. Tall came to the conclusion that this pulverized soil was providing more nutrients to the plants. Basically, he thought that the soil itself, tiny tiny particles of soil were what the plants were eating through what he called lacteal mouths on their roots. He decided that soil, and only soil, was what plants needed to survive, not something in the soil, not water, not air, not sunlight, just very very finely tilled soil. In his mind, the roll of water in this equation was to carry the tiny soil particles closer to those lacteal mouths. The cartoon that has formed in my head is so delightful right now. Tall decided to try pulverizing the soil around his crops it prosperous farm, where much of the land was relatively shallow and chalky. He developed a horse drawn plow for this purpose, using it in that gap between his rows while workers manually hod the soil around the plants themselves. He thought new roots had more mouths than old roots, so if a plant's roots were broken by all this hoeing, that was okay. It just meant new roots would grow in to replace them, complete with more mouths. Tall tried this method on several different crops that farm, including turnips, potatoes, and wheat, and he reported that it was enormously successful in terms of efficiency and yield, and as a bonus, it allowed him to replace some of his higher paid workers with women and children who he could pay a lot less, since their jobs mostly involved moving clods of dirt out of the way if they fell in a bad spot after plowing, and in his opinion, this method eliminated the need for manure, something he was extremely pleased about since he thought manure spread weeds. He claimed that this method allowed him to grow wheat in the same field for thirteen years without using manure or allowing the soil to lie fallow. He said, quote, the finer land is made by tillage, the richer will it become, and the more plants will it maintain, or more briefly, tillage is manure. So to be fair, the details about how plants grew and what it took to nourish them were poorly under stood in Britain at this point. All around the world for the whole history of agriculture, people had been using techniques like crop rotation, planting different types of plants together, and using things like manure, urine, fish parts, and other materials to restore the soil. But while people knew that these steps usually led to a better harvest, they didn't know why they worked exactly. Today we understand that specific nutrients are critical to plant growth, especially phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen, but when Tall was farming, only phosphorus had even been discovered. Europeans also only had a partial understanding of photosynthesis, and as we noted earlier, a lot of the conventional farming wisdom was drawn from Virgil that was more than seventeen hundred years old. That doesn't mean it was necessarily bad. It's just been around for a really long time. Did not have the benefit of newly developed ideas and discoveries. Right, But even with all of that in mind, tells ideas about plants being better able to consume very fine particles of pulverized soil, we're just not correct. His intensive hoeing definitely helped remove weeds that would have competed with his crops for nutrients, and it probably allowed water to penetrate more easily, especially if rainfall, and do meant that that soil never totally dried out. But he was not making it easier for plants to take in soil particles through these tiny theoretical root mouths, and hoeing definitely did not take the place of replenishing the soils. Nutrients was something like manure. Yeah, I think a big reason that he was able to make that thirteen years of wheat in the same field number one. We're taking his word on that, right, but it was still as great in year thirteen as it had been in year one. But the fact that he had these big spaces in his rose probably meant that the soil was not being exhausted as it would have been if it had been packed more tightly together with plants. In one Tell published some of his ideas in a work called The New horse Hoeing Husbandry, or an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation, wherein is shown a method of introducing a sort of vineyard culture into the corn fields. He called this a specimen. It was something that he planned to expand on in a longer work. Tell nearly abandoned this plan after a plagiarized version of his essay showed up not long after. He claimed his was the first book on agriculture ever to be so pirated. But regardless, his friends encouraged him to continue on, and in seventeen thirty three he published the much longer The horse Hoeing Husbandry, or An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation, designed to introduce a new method of culture whereby the produce of land will be increased and the usual expense lessened, together with accurate descriptions and cuts of the instruments employed in it. Uh, not everybody was happy about this. We will talk about it after a sponsor break. Jeffrey Tells book The Horse Hoeing Husbandry explained his process for planting and hoeing the fields and his reasoning behind it. It included diagrams of the equipment that a farmer would need for such an enterprise, with explanations of what the parts of those machines did and how they worked. There were different seed drills for different types of crops, plus horse drawn hose and other tools, all of his design. This on its own would have caused at least some controversy. The upfront cost for equipment would have been significant, especially since manufacturing methods had not progressed to the point that things like this could really be mass produced. You would need experienced craftspeople who could build the machines mostly from scratch. Plus a lot of farmers still found that six foot gap between rows to just be incredibly wasteful. Beyond all that, though, Tall also took the time in his book to criticize existing farming practices, which he framed as old husbandry or even bad husbandry. His own method was the new husbandry or the good husbandry, and at times he took aim directly at Virgil, criticizing Virgil's recommendations for how to do things like plow burn until the land gardner and nurseryman Stephen Switzer, was particularly outraged by all of this. It's possible that at least some of his outrage stemmed from the fact that part of his income came from selling seeds, so if everyone started using methods that required just a fraction of their normal seed purchases, that would damage his business. But he also seems to have been incensed on principle, seeing Virgil's work as the foundation of good husbandry that had quote stood the test of so many ages, and probably seeing Virgil himself as a man who should not have to face this kind of insolence. So Switzer established a private society of husbandmen and planters and opposition to tell although it's not clear how many members there were besides Switzer, if any. He accused Tull of plagiarizing John Worlidge as well as earlier agricultural writers. Switzer also pointed out specific flaws that he saw in Tull's ideas. For example, it was quote ridiculous to affirm that one and the same culture and one in the same kind of manure is common to all sorts of land. Switzer even accused Tull of being an atheist. Oh the very worst. Switzer published Practical Husbandman and Planter, or Observations on the Ancient and Modern Husbandry, Planting and Gardening over a series of installments. These volumes layout switzers i ideas of good husbandry, many of which were drawn from Virgil, and they directly criticized Toll's work as well as criticizing Toll as a person. Here is a sample quote. If men are known by their words as a tree is by its fruit, there never was a man who has distinguished himself more than the author of the horse hoeing husbandry has. The deepest rivers are generally allowed to be the most silent, and the greatest noise is ever found where there is the least depth of water. And it is the general but true observation that those who are weakest in understanding are the strongest in opinion. This author has, by uttering his precipitate and crude conceptions, discovered himself to be little better than the animal in the fable who, putting on the lion's skin, terrified all the beasts of the forest till by his voice, they knew who he was. Handsome, very clear opinions about Jethro Tall, So Jethro It's all. Responded to Switzer's many criticisms with a supplement to the Essay on horse Hoeing Husbandry in seventy six. This he tried to refute Switzer point by point. He called the society of husbandmen and planters the equivocal society, or just Equivocus disappeared in later editions of horse Hoeing Husbandry, as Jethro tells supplement answering the objections of Equivocus in defense of Virgil. Among his points, quote Equivocus falsely accuses Tall of disrespect and not finding one useful truth in the Georgic. By quoting falsely, Equivocus does not prove his case. I feel like these two men would have loved Twitter, but that's I'm imagining, like one of the like a tumbler fight where going on forever. Switzer was not though the only person Tell was not getting along with Jethro's son, John was stravagant in his spending, and his relationship to his family seems to have become strained after Tell died on February seventeen forty one, at the age of sixty six. He left his property to his sister in law and his daughter's but he left John only a shilling. John ultimately died in the Debtors prison in seventeen sixty four. Jethro Tull was widely read and hotly debated from the seventeen thirties until the end of his life in seventeen forty one, but after his death most of his techniques sort of fell out of favor for a time, at least in Britain. His work was translated into French, although the French translations mostly focused on the techniques that were most demonstrably workable and not on the things that seemed a little more far fetched. The roots have mouths. Tell's legacy as a farmer is kind of a mixed bag. In the words of th. H. Marshall, writing in the Economic History Review in nine quote, he had apparently, first of allved his system of husbandry, then invented a scientific theory to explain it, and finally begun to study the literature of his subject. Overall, Marshall's analysis of Tull's agricultural reforms, it's not favorable. He wrote, quote, posterity is apt to be overkind to the inventor. It remembers only those of his ideas which have been incorporated in the life of the present, and forgets all those which time has rejected. It assumes that his mistakes and false notions were due to the ignorance of his age, rather than to his own incompetence, and convicts of pusillanimity those of his contemporaries who hesitated to follow his inspiration, shedding his errors as they traveled onwards. And so it is with Tull. But the picture is false. His mistakes were not those of his age. The experts of his could and did denounce them as mistakes. The bad elements in his system were not merely traditions from the past which he was not yet ready to throw aside. They were new. He was asking men to make a revolution in order to adopt what was unsound. It is not surprising that they hesitated. A lot of Toll's ideas were just wildly incorrect. But there were elements to his work that were useful and withstood the test of time, like developing ways to plant fields more uniformly and efficiently in wasting less seed. In seventeen sixty two, the London based Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce established a medal for people who improved on the seed drill and who tested methods of old and new husbandry to determine what worked best and what didn't. Tull was also part of what came to be known as the agricultural revolution in Britain, as people developed in proved ways to prepare the soil, plants, tenned, and harvest. This ran alongside the enclosure movement, in which previously common land was enclosed in fences and small farms were consolidated into large estates that were controlled by one wealthy landlord, often one who wanted very large fields of a single crop to be sold for the best possible price. Apart from changes in land use and animal husbandry, the agricultural revolution was also connected to the development of machines like improved plows, cultivators, threshers and tull seed drill. Through all these developments, between seventeen hundred and eighteen seventy, British farms became about four times more productive. This led to a drop in food prices and an increase in the varieties of food available. Improvements and food preservation played a part in all of this as well. All this contributed to an increasing in population. Just in the eighteenth century, the population of England and Wales almost doubled. We should note that this increase in food production did not eliminate poverty or famine. The Great Famine in Ireland, which we've covered in a two part episode of the podcast, took place during this same time, but the issue in this spamine was not a lack of food. There was plenty of food being grown for export, but a blight killed the potato crop that Irish farmers were living off of while growing other food to be sold, and the government's lay say fair approach to the crisis led to the food continuing to be exported even as the people who were growing it we're starving. Even as the agricultural revolution led to more and more food being grown in Britain's rural areas, more of its population moved into the cities because the time and labor saving devices and methods that were being developed meant that farmers could do more with fewer workers. As the agricultural revel lution intersected with the Industrial Revolution, former rural farm workers, many of whom had lost access to land they had been using after it was enclosed, started to find jobs in urban factories instead. One of the biggest points of overlap between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution was the cotton gin, patented by Eli Whitney in sevent and totally shifting the cotton industry. The cotton gin made harvested cotton much easier to clean, which made it more profitable to grow, which led growers to want to plant more of it, which created a demand for more and more enslaved workers in places like the American South, where cotton became a primary crop. Tells planting methods for efficiency purposes also fed into this process with cotton. As for Jethro Tull's most famous invention, the seed drill did not become a reliable or practical part of farming until the nineteenth century, when improved manufacturing processes led to a model that was practical, affordable, and generally reliable. Wheel write James Smith of Suffolk developed a model along with his sons, which became known as the Suffolk drill and was available for five pounds in eighteen fifty one. It could sow multiple rows at once with adjustable spacing between the rows, and it had a manure box to apply manure at the same time. The depth and rate of sewing were adjustable as well. These did not follow tolls template of two to three rows in ridges four to six ft apart. Many drilled ten to twelve rows of seeds at once. Yeah, they're pretty cool to watch, which I was very much enjoying watching on all of these BBC historic farm shows. I also enjoyed watching them throw there. I think they were they were planting I think field peas when they were sowing the seeds by manually broadcasting them then leading me to just go down this whole jeth throw toll rabbit hole. What you got in the way? A listener mail? I have listener mail about Gin from Kendall. Kendall said, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I came across your show a few weeks back and absolutely love it. The details you share, you're back and forth, and the way you always seem to shed light on important issues related to historical events. It's all wonderful. My first episode was actually the one about vacuum cleaners. I found this episode so fascinating, and I've been listening to new and past episodes every moment I'm not chasing my three year old around. Last week's episode about Gin finally gave me something interesting to write to you about. As you were talking about how you could not find any neighbor to try, you mentioned the small painted houses that Klem gives to business class passengers and that they're filled with your neighbor. I dropped the large clippers I was using to trim my trees outside when I heard this, because I have one of those small ceramic painted houses. My husband and I were flying back from Sweden to visit family in the US back in on a Kalem flight. Our son was four months old at the time, his first flight. Every attendant on the flight was so kind to us and all were like, hello, welcome, you're our baby flyer. Before we got off the plane, they gave us a card in one of the beautiful, tiny painted Delf houses and memory of our son's first airplane flight. When the attendant told us it was filled with Jen probably lacking the time to inevitably explain to us what your neighbor was when asked. Now that I know this Delt house is filled with this unusual spirit. I can't wait to pop it open and try it. The collectible sits on a glass shelf with some other meetingful mementos in our house. Now having moved back to the US, it reminds us of better times traveling with our little one and having happy interactions with others in public, two better times. Thanks for your wonderful show, Kendall. Thank you so much for this email, Kendle. We've gotten several emails from folks about those Blue Kalem houses and all of them have been really delightful, So thank you so much. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, where a history podcast at i heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.