SYMHC Classics: Jethro Tull

This 2021 episode covers Jethro Tull. Today, most people only know that as the name of a band, but Tull was an 18th-century gentleman farmer often credited with inventing the seed drill.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. After this week's episode on the Swing Riots,
we are staying in the world of British agriculture today
for Today's Saturday Classic. It is our episode on Jethro Tull,
most well known for creating a seed drill. This episode
talks more about the long term impact of mechanization and

(00:22):
the British agricultural Revolution, rather than the immediate impacts.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
On farm workers in the short term.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Which is what we talked about more in the Swing
Riots episode. The big exception is Tull's own workers, who
he very obviously wanted to replace with machines. This episode,
which is very fun in many ways, originally came out
on December twenty second, twenty twenty one. Enjoy Welcome to

(00:50):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. 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,

(01:27):
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 Langlan's and then
Tom Pinfeld replaced Alex in Tudor 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,

(01:48):
and they have been like my downtime viewing for the
past little stretch.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
So watching these.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
In the order that they came out means that I
had seen a lot of fields being planted us 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 Tudor Monastery Farm, which is set
before the seed drill was used in Britain, and there's

(02:16):
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 Jethro Tull invented the seed drill, And I
had one of those record scratch mental moments because I

(02:39):
think of Jethro Tull as.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
The name of a band, and while I probably.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
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. Well,
so that became what I had to do a podcast
on next. He could or could not play the jazz flute.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
We don't know.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
We actually don't know Jethro Tull's birth date, but he
was baptized on March thirtieth, 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.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
In fact, the.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
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 Jethro Tull also had an
uncle who was also named Jethro Tull. This other Jethro
Tull was married to a woman named Mary, and at
various points Jethrow, husband of Dorothy, and Jethrow, husband of Mary,

(03:52):
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 Jethro
Tulls were the same person, and a paper that I
read that tried to sort all of this out used

(04:12):
Roman numerals to differentiate them, even though they were not
really Jethro Tell.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
The first, second and third.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Uh. The agriculturist Jethro Tell, that is, the Jethro Tell
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

(04:41):
financially shaky ground. He also got a lot of criticism,
which we will get to, which seems to have made
him just reluctant to talk about himself. So what we
know about his life is mostly pieced together from his writing.
Jethro Tull attended Saint John's College, Oxford, but there's no
evidence that he earned a degree that In sixteen ninety

(05:02):
three he was admitted as a student at Gray's Inn,
which is one of the four inns 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,

(05:23):
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 twenty sixth.

(05:45):
The pair would go on to have five children, four
daughters and one son. Although Jethro 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

(06:05):
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, in every
other process and agriculture recommended by mister Tull et cetera
are considered. Forbes published that in seventeen eighty six he wrote,

(06:29):
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. Dung 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

(06:52):
broadcast which is covered by the plow or harrow Nothing
more is usually done till harvest, except wheat 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 BCE, and that is a
very long, multi volume work of verse that praised the

(07:14):
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,

(07:38):
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

(07:59):
land to pureeriodically life fallow. It was, in Toll'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

(08:21):
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 Foin. If you
think that he sounds a little resentful of his workers
in this passage, you're correct. He seems to have resented

(08:44):
needing to hire people to do anything. So san Foyn
is a legume that was grown for forage, and at
this point Sanfoyn's seed was almost exclusively important to England,
and this made it expensive and kind of hard to get.
And in Tull's experience, once a farmer did get it,
a lot of it just did not sprout. So Tall

(09:06):
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 foins sown with that
proportion of seed that in those parts of them which
produced the best crop there was, as I counted them

(09:29):
when the crop was taken off, but about one plant
for each square foot of surface. And yet the number
of seeds in seven bushels sown 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

(09:49):
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 s scarce any even
of the best, would succeed unless covered at a certain depth,
especially in my strong land. In other words, rather than

(10:10):
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 seemed like,
based on how much seed people were using and where
the plants are growing the best, they were using like
one hundred and forty times more seeds than was necessary.

(10:31):
So to try to make this whole process more controlled quote,
I employed people to make channels and sow 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.

(10:52):
And yet the ground of seed was better planted ten
acres being so well done, I did not doubt, but
a thousand and 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 sow the seeds in them quote,

(11:14):
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

(11:36):
engine to plant sane foiin more faithfully than such hands
would do. In other words, Jethrotol concluded that his workers
were doing a bad job just despite him, so he
fired them and decided he would make a machine to
sow his sane foin seed instead. We will talk more
about that after a sponsor break. Jeffro Tull was not

(12:08):
the first person to try to use some kind of
a tool or a machine to plant his crops. I
should also note, like we're talking about ways to sew
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

(12:31):
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

(12:52):
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 sixteen ninety nine,
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

(13:13):
Europe in the late seventeenth century. When Tull decided to
contrive an engine to plant his same fin, 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

(13:34):
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 that had ever entered my imagination,
and at last pitched upon a groove, tongue, and spring

(13:54):
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
or furrows by hand, they called that action drilling. Tull

(14:16):
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 foiin thus planted
brings better crops and lasteth longer than sown same foiin.

(14:36):
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 drill's wheels,
so it turned as the wheels did. There was a
plow toward 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

(14:58):
that covered the seeds up. So this meant that the
seeds were dropped in a straight line to do a
specific depth, and then covered all at once, as long
as your horse was going in a straight line while
pulling it. So, in Tull's words, his drill did this
quote with great exactness and expedition. Tall made various refinements

(15:20):
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 feet 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

(15:43):
manually broadcasting seeds. Even if somebody was pretty good at
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

(16:05):
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

(16:28):
he was doing, a lot of them thought he was
letting a lot of plantsable land go to waste by
leaving these four to six foot gaps in between his rows.
Tull farmed in Oxfordshire for about ten years before moving
to Prosperous Farm in Shelbourne, 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

(16:52):
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 seventeen thirteen. Something that Tull noticed while
in Italy and France was how carefully the vineyards were

(17:13):
planted and managed. The soil in between the rose 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

(17:35):
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

(17:57):
tilled soil, and his mind the roll of water, and
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 at Prosperous Farm,

(18:18):
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 rose while workers manually
hoed 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.

(18:40):
It just meant new roots would grow in to replace them,
complete with more mouths. Tull tried this method on several
different crops at his 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 it higher paid workers with

(19:01):
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

(19:23):
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

(19:45):
and what it took to nourish them were poorly understood
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 to together,
and using things like manure, urine, fish parts, and other
materials to restore the soil. But while people knew that

(20:08):
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 Tull was farming, only phosphorus had even been discovered.
Europeans also only had a partial understanding of photosynthesis, and

(20:32):
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, Tull's ideas

(20:55):
about plants being better able to consume very fine particles
of pulverized soil oil, 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 of rainfall and dew. Meant that
that soil never totally dried out, But he was not

(21:17):
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 soil's nutrients with
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

(21:39):
year thirteen as it had been in year one. But
the fact that he had these big spaces in his
rows 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 seventeen thirty one, Tell
published some of his ideas in a work called The
New horse Hoeing Husbandry, or an Essay on the print

(22:00):
Sciples of Tillage and Vegetation, wherein is shown a method
of introducing a sort of vineyard culture into the cornfields.
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

(22:21):
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,

(22:43):
together with accurate descriptions and cuts of the instruments employed
in it. Not everybody was happy about this. We will
talk about it after a sponsor break. Jeffro Tull's book

(23:05):
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

(23:26):
hoes and other tools, all of his design. This on
its own would have caused at least some controversy. The
upfront costs 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 crafts people who could build the machines mostly from scratch.

(23:48):
Plus a lot of farmers still found that six foot
gap between rows to just be incredibly wasteful. Beyond all that, though,
Tull 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

(24:09):
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 and till. 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

(24:31):
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

(24:53):
who should not have to face this kind of insolence.
So Switzer established a private society of Husbandmen and Planters
in opposition to Tull, 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.

(25:16):
Switzer also pointed out specific flaws that he saw in
Tull's ideas. For example, it was quote ridiculous to affirm
that one in 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

(25:40):
on the Ancient and Modern Husbandry, Planting and Gardening over
a series of installments. These volumes lay out Switzer's ideas
of good husbandry, many of which were drawn from Virgil,
and they directly criticized Tull's work as well as criticizing
Tull as a person. Here is a sample quote. If
known by their words, as a tree is by its fruit,

(26:03):
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

(26:24):
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. Had
some very clear opinions about Jethrotel. So jethroat Al responded

(26:49):
to Switzer's many criticisms with a supplement to the Essay
on horse Hoeing Husbandry in seventeen thirty six. This he
tried to refute Switzer point by point. He called the
society of husbandmen and planters the equivocal society, or just equivocus.
This appeared in later editions of horse Hoeing Husbandry as

(27:11):
Jethro Tull's supplement answering the objections of Equivocus in defense
of Virgil. Among his points, quote Equivocus falsely accuses Tull
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

(27:32):
that's it. I'm imagining like one of the like a
tumbler fight wherever right well, just going on forever. Switzer
was not, though, the only person Tull was not getting
along with Jethro's son, John, was extravagant in his spending,
and his relationship to his family seems to have become strained.

(27:54):
After Tull died on February twenty first, seventeen forty one,
at the age of sixty six, He left his property
to his sister in law and his daughters. But he
left John only a shilling. John ultimately died in a
debtor's prison in seventeen sixty four. Jethroatell was widely read
and hotly debated from the seventeen thirties until the end

(28:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
The roots have mouths.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
Tull's legacy as a farmer is kind of a mixed bag.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
In the words of th. H.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Marshall, writing in the Economic History Review in nineteen twenty nine,
quote he had apparently first evolved 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,

(29:06):
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,

(29:26):
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

(29:48):
day 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.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
They were new.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
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 Tull'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.

(30:25):
In seventeen sixty two, the London based Society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and commerce established a metal 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,

(30:46):
as people developed improved ways to prepare the soil, plants, tend,
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

(31:08):
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

(31:30):
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 in 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

(31:53):
note that this increase in food production did not eliminate
poverty or famine. 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 famine was
not a lack of food. There was plenty of food
being grown for export, but a blight killed the potato

(32:16):
crop that Irish farmers were living off of while growing
other food to be sold, and the government's laissez faire
approach to the crisis led to the food continuing to
be exported even as the people who were growing it
were starving. Even as the agricultural revolution led to more
and more food being grown in Britain's rural areas, more

(32:37):
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 Revolution 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

(32:58):
find jobs in urban factories, One of the biggest points
of overlap between the agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution
was the cotton gen patented by Eli Whitney in seventeen
ninety four and totally shifting the cotton industry. The cotton
gen made harvested cotton much easier to clean, which made

(33:19):
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. Tull's planting methods for
efficiency purposes also fed into this process with cotton. As
for Jethro Tull's most famous invention, the seed drill did

(33:42):
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. Wheelwright 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 sew

(34:04):
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 Toll's template of
two to three rows in ridges four to six feet apart.
Many drilled ten to twelve rows of seeds at once. Yeah,

(34:25):
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 their I think 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 Jethro Toll rabbit hole. Thanks

(34:53):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd
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