AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS.
It is wonderful for how many generations men were contented to throw
grain into the air as the Parable relates:
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow, and when he sowed some seeds fell by
the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: some fell on
stony places where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung
up, because they had no deepness of earth; and when the sun was up they
were scorched; and because they had no root they withered away. And some
fell among thorns and the thorns sprung up and choked them. But others
fell into good ground and brought forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some
sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold.”
Here are indicated the defects in depositing the seed that only the
inventions of the century have fully corrected. The equal distribution
of the seed and not its wide scattering, its sowing in regular drills or
planting at intervals, at certain and uniform depths, the adaptation of
devices to meet the variations in the land to be planted, and in short
the substitution of quick, certain, positive mechanisms for the slow,
uncertain, variable hand of man. Not only has the increase an
hundredfold been obtained, but with the machines of to-day the sowing
and planting of a hundredfold more land has been made possible, the
employment of armies of men where idleness would have reigned, and the
feeding of millions of people among whom hunger would otherwise have
prevailed. Not only did this machinery not exist at the beginning of the
century, but the agricultural machines and devices in this line of the
character existing fifty years ago are now discarded as useless and
worthless.
It is true that, as in the case of the ploughs, attempts had been made
through the centuries to invent and improve seeding implements. The
Assyrians 500 years B. C. had in use a rude plough in which behind the
sharp wooden plough point was fixed a bowl-shaped hopper through which
seed was dropped into the furrow, and was covered by the falling back of
the furrow upon it. The Chinese, probably before that time, had a
wheelbarrow arrangement with a seed hopper and separate seed spouts. In
India a drilling hopper had been attached to a plough. Italy claims the
honour among European nations of first introducing a machine for sowing
grain. It was invented about the beginning of the seventeenth century
and is described by Zanon in his _Work on Agriculture_ printed at Venice
in 1764. It was a machine mounted on two wheels, that had a seed box in
the bottom of which was a series of holes opening into a corresponding
number of metal tubes or funnels. At their front these tubes at their
lower ends were sharpened to make small furrows into which the seed
dropped.
Similar single machines were in the course of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries devised in Austria and England. The one in Austria
was invented by a Spaniard, one Don Joseph de Lescatello, tested in
Luxembourg in 1662. The inventor was rewarded by the Emperor,
recommended to the King of Spain, and in 1663 and 1664 his machines were
made and sold at Madrid. The knowledge of this Spaniard’s invention was
made known in England in 1699 by the Earl of Sandwich and John Evelyn.
Jethro Tull in England shortly after invented and introduced a combined
system of drilling, ploughing and cultivating. He sowed different seeds
from the same machine, and arranged that they might be covered at
different depths. Tull’s machines were much improved by James Cooke, a
clergyman of Lancashire, England; and also in the last decade of the
eighteenth century by Baldwin and Wells of Norfolk, England.
Washington and others in America had also commenced to invent and
experiment with seeding machines. But as before intimated, the
nineteenth century found the great mass of farmers everywhere sowing
their wheat and other grains by throwing them into the air by hand, to
be met by the gusts of wind and blown into hollows and on ridges, on
stones and thorny places,--requiring often a second and third repetition
of the same tedious process.
In 1878 Mr. Coffin, a distinguished journalist of Boston, in an address
before the Patent Committee of the U. S. Senate, set forth the
advantages obtained by the modern improvements in seeders as follows:
“The seeder covers the soil to a uniform depth. It sows evenly, and sows
a specific quantity. You may graduate it so that, after a little
experience, you can determine the amount per acre even to a quart of
wheat. They sow all kinds of grain,--wheat, clover, and superphosphate,
if need be, at once. They harrow at the same time. They make the crop
more certain. It is the united testimony of manufacturers and farmers
alike that the crop is increased from one-eighth to one-fourth,
especially in the winter wheat. Winter wheat, you are aware, in the
freezing and thawing season, is apt to heave out. It is desirable to
bury the seed a uniform and proper depth and to throw over the young
plant such an amount of soil that it shall not heave with the freezing
and thawing. Of the 360,000,000 bushels of wheat raised last year I
suppose more than 300,000,000 was winter wheat. One-eighth of this is
37,700,000 bushels.”
It would seem to many that after the adoption of a seed hopper, and
spouts with sharpened ends that cut the drill rows in the furrows and
deposited the seed therein, that little was left to be done in this
class of inventions; but a great many improvements were necessary.
Gravity alone could not be depended upon for feeding the seed. Means had
to be devised for a continuous and regular discharge from each grain
tube; for varying the quantity of the seed fed by varying the escape
openings, or by positive mechanical movements variable in speed; for
fixing accurately the quantity of seed discharged; for changing the
apparatus to feed coarse or fine seed; and for rendering the apparatus
efficient on different surfaces--steep hillsides, level plains,
irregular lands.
An important step was the substitution of what is called the “force
feed” for the gravity feed. There is a variety of devices for this
purpose, the principle of one of them being a revolving feed wheel
located beneath the hopper, and above each spout, the two casings
between which the feed wheel revolves forming the outer walls of a
complete measuring channel, or throat, through which the grain is
carried by the rotary motion of the wheel, thus providing the means of
measuring the seed with as much accuracy as could be done by a small
measure. The quantity sown per acre is governed by simply increasing or
diminishing the speed of the feed wheel. In one form of device this
change of speed is altered by a system of cone gearing. A graduated flow
of the seed has also been effected by the employment of a cylinder
having a smooth and fluted part working in a cup beneath the hopper with
provision for adjustment of the smooth part towards and from the fluted
part to cut off or increase the flow.
To avoid the use of a separate apparatus for separate sizes of grain and
other seed, the seed holder has been divided into parts--one part for
containing wheat, barley and other medium-sized grains, and another for
corn, peas and the larger seeds. And as these parts are used on separate
occasions, the respective apertures are opened or closed by a sliding
bottom and by a single movement of the hand.
Rubber tubes for conducting the seed through the hollow holes were
introduced in place of the metal spouts that answered both as a spout
and a hoe.
In place of the common hoe drill of a form used in the early part of the
century, the hoes being forced into the soil by the use of levers and
weights, what are known as “shoe drills” have largely succeeded. A
series of shoes are pivoted to the frame, extend beneath the seed box,
and are provided with springs for depressing or raising them.
All kinds of seeds and fertilisers, separately or together, may be now
sown, and the broadcast sowing of a larger area than that covered by the
throw of the hand can now be given by machinery.
Corn and cotton seed are thus also planted, mixed or unmixed with the
fertilising material.
Not only have light ploughs been combined with small seed boxes and one
or more seed tubes, for easy work in gardens, but the arrangements
varied and graded for different uses until is reached that great machine
run by steam power, in which is assembled a gang of heavy harrows in
front to loosen and pulverise the soil, then the seed and fertilising
drill of capacious width for sowing the grain in rows, followed by a
lighter broad harrow to cover the seed, and all so arranged that the
steam lifts the heavy frames on turning, and all controlled easily by
the man who rides upon the machine.
In planting at intervals or in hills, as corn and potatoes, and other
like larger seeds, no longer is the farmer required to trudge across the
wide field carrying a heavy load in bag or box, or compel his boys or
women folk to drop the seed while he follows on laboriously with the
hoe. He may now ride, if he so choose, and the machine which carries him
furnishes the motive power for operating the supply and cut-off of the
grain at intervals.
The object of the farmer in planting corn is to plant it in straight
lines about four feet apart each way, putting from three to five grains
into each spot in a scattered and not huddled condition. These objects
are together nicely accomplished by a variety of modern machines.
The planting of great fields of potatoes has been greatly facilitated by
machinery that first slices them and then sows the slices continuously
in a row, or drops them in separate spots or hills, as may be desired.
The finest seeds, such as grass and clover, onion and turnip seed, and
delicate seed like rice, are handled and sown by machines without
crushing or bruising, and with the utmost exactness. Just what seed is
necessary to be supplied to the machine for a given area is decided
upon, and the machine distributes the same with the same nicety that a
doctor distributes the proper dose of pellets upon the palm of his
patient.
Transplanters as well as planters have been devised. These transplanters
will dig the plant trench, distribute the fertiliser, set the plant,
pack the earth and water the plant, automatically.
The class of machines known as cultivators are those only, properly
speaking, which are employed to cultivate the plant after the crop is
above the ground. The duties which they perform are to loosen the earth,
destroy the weeds, and throw the loosened earth around the growing
plant.
Here again the laborious hoe has been succeeded by the labour-saving
machine.
Cultivators have names which indicate their construction and the crop
with which they are adapted to be used. Thus there are “corn
cultivators,” “cotton cultivators,” “sugar-cane cultivators,” etc.
Riding cultivators are known as “sulky cultivators” where they are
provided with two wheels and a seat for the driver.
If worked between two rows they are termed single, and when between
three rows, double cultivators. A riding cultivator adapted to work
three rows has an arched axle to pass over the rows of the growing
plants and cultivate both sides of the plants in each row. Double
cultivators are constructed so that their outside teeth may be adjusted
in and out from the centre of the machine to meet the width of the rows
between which they operate. A “walking cultivator” is when the operator
walks and guides the machine with the hands as with ploughs. Ordinary
ploughs are converted into cultivators by supplying them with double
adjustable mould boards. Ingenious arrangements generally exist for
widening or narrowing the cultivator and for throwing the soil from the
centre of the furrow to opposite sides and against the plant. The depth
to which the shares or cultivator blades work in the ground may be
adjusted by a gauge wheel upon the draught beam, or a roller on the back
of the frame.
Disk cultivators are those in which disk blades instead of ploughs are
used with which to disturb the soil already broken. As with ploughs, so
with cultivators, steam-engines are employed to draw a gang of
cultivating teeth or blades, their framework, and the operator seated
thereon, to and fro across the field between two or more rows, turning
and running the machine at the end of the rows.
Millet’s recent celebrated painting represents a brutal, primitive type
of a man leaning heavily on a hoe as ancient and woful in character as
the man himself. It is a picture of hopeless drudgery and blank
ignorance. Markham, the poet, has seized upon this picture, dwelt
eloquently on its horrors, and apostrophised it as if it were a
condition now existing. He exclaims,
“O masters, lords and rulers in all lands
How will the future reckon with this man?”
The present has already reckoned with him, and he and his awkward
implement of drudgery nowhere exist, except as left-over specimens of
ancient and pre-historic misery occasionally found in some benighted
region of the world.
The plough and the hoe are the chief implements with which man has
subdued the earth. Their use has not been confined to the drudge and the
slave, but men, the leaders and ornaments of their race, have stood
behind them adding to themselves graces, and crowning labor with
dignity. Cincinnatus is only one of a long line of public men in ancient
and modern times who have served their country in the ploughfield as
well as on the field of battle and in the halls of Legislation. We hear
the song of the poet rising with that of the lark as he turns the sod.
Burns, lamenting that his share uptears the bed of the “wee modest
crimson-tipped flower” and sorrowing that he has turned the “Mousie”
from its “bit o’ leaves and stibble” by the cruel coulter. The finest
natures, tuned too fine to meet the rude blasts of the world, have
shrunk like Cowper to rural scenes, and sought with the hoe among
flowers and plants for that balm and strength unfound in crowded marts.
But the dignity imparted to the profession of Agriculture by a few has
now by the genius of invention become the heritage of all.
While prophets have lamented, and artists have painted, and poets
sorrowed over the drudgeries of the tillers of the soil, the tillers
have steadily and quietly and with infinite patience and toil worked out
their own salvation. They no longer find themselves “plundered and
profaned and disinherited,” but they have yoked the forces of nature to
their service, and the cultivation of the earth, the sowing of the seed,
the nourishment of the plant, have become to them things of pleasurable
labour.
With the aid of these inventions which have been turned into their hands
by the prolific developments of the century they are, so far as the soil
is concerned, no longer “brothers of the ox,” but king of kings and lord
of lords.