Jethro Tull

English inventor

• Born: March 30, 1674
• Birthplace: Bradfield, near Basildon, Berkshire, England
• Died: February 21, 1741
• Place of death: Prosperous Farm, near Hungerford, Berkshire, England

Tull’s publications describing his farming experiments and inventions spread knowledge of new agricultural techniques, thereby contributing to the network of changes that constituted the Agricultural Revolution.

Early Life

Jethro Tull seems to have planned for a political career. The son of Jethro and Dorothy Tull, he was part of a gentry family that extended over the Berkshire-Oxfordshire borderlands. He matriculated at St. John’s College, Oxford, in July, 1691; two years later he entered Gray’s Inn and was called to the bar in May, 1699. Apparently poor health deterred him from politics, and he settled into farming soon after his marriage on October 26, 1699, to Susannah Smith, of a Warwickshire gentry family.

For about nine years he farmed land that he had inherited from his father at Howberry, on the Thames River in Oxfordshire near Wallingford. In about 1709, he moved to Prosperous Farm in Berkshire near Hungerford, considering its location and climate to be more healthful. Concern for his health was the chief factor in his taking the Grand Tour from 1711 to 1714, staying for a time at Montpellier. During this travel in France and Italy, he made careful observations on farming.

Life’s Work

When Jethro Tull began his farming career, some of the changes that would revolutionize English agriculture were under way. New practices were introduced from the Low Countries in the second half of the seventeenth century, but by about 1750 agricultural innovation would have an English life of its own. The central factor in the Agricultural Revolution was the use of mixed farming, which dramatically increased the fertility of the soil. Selective livestock breeding and the use of machinery were important also. Tull’s innovations contributed to the development of mixed farming and to the use of machinery, and his writings made the knowledge of agricultural experiments widely available, particularly to gentlemen farmers such as he.

Mixed farming combined the planting of root crops, legumes, and other nitrogen-fixing crops in careful rotation with the nitrogen-depleting grains; increased the growing of livestock; and utilized tillage and draining practices that made solid nutrients more available to the crops. Systemic reinforcements encouraged the mix: Many of the soil-building crops were fed to livestock, and additional manure was a welcome by-product of the increase in livestock production.

Most of England’s arable land is in the Lowland Zone, southeast of an imaginary line linking the mouths of the Exe and Tees Rivers. Within the Lowland Zone, soils are either light (consisting of light loams, fertile sands, chalky soils, or limestone soils) or the heavy soils of the clay vales. The heavy soils long had been in grain production. The light soils had not been fertile enough for permanent cultivation but had been useful for sheep pasturage; they held advantages for the use of mixed farming, however, for they drain freely and are easily cultivated. Mixed farming practices on the lighter soils resulted in the maintenance of fertility without the use of fallow. Most of Tull’s farming was in the lighter soils.

Tull typified the spirit of experiment and innovation that characterized the educated classes in the early eighteenth century. As a beginning farmer he eagerly adopted irrigation of stream-side pasture and the use of fodder crops such as turnips, swedes, and grasses. Such innovations seem to have been inspired by the rise in livestock prices as compared with grain prices toward the end of the seventeenth century. Along with other experimenters, particularly gentlemen farmers and large landowners, Tull proved the efficiency of the components of mixed farming. He and his contemporaries relied on trial and error. Although there is no indication that their experiments owed anything to contemporary science, the innovating farmers were linked with the broader spirit of the Enlightenment by their reliance on experiment and observation.

Tull is best known for The Horse-Hoing Husbandry: Or, An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation, which he published in 1733. He first published a specimen quarto edition in 1731, which a Dublin printer pirated. Tull said that he forswore further publication but reconsidered in response to several letters. The book’s central theme was instruction in planting grain by drill, in beds separated by rows wide enough to be cultivated with a horse-drawn device. The combination of sowing the seeds in drills and hoeing the intervening strips kept down weeds, and the hoeing produced a fine tilth in the soil that nurtured the young plants and increased their growth, thereby reducing the need for fallow. Tull believed that the method would work well only in easily cultivated and well-drained soils. He indicated that the idea for regular cultivation of the strips came from observing vineyards in Languedoc during his travels. There he had observed that pulverizing the soil between rows of vines substituted for manuring, and when he returned home he tried the method, first on potatoes and turnips, then on wheat. He refined the method for wheat and found that he could preserve fertility, even on wheat land, for up to thirteen years without the use of manure. Indeed, Tull advised against using manure, convinced that its propensity for spreading weeds outweighed its soil-building qualities. In this matter Tull was strictly at variance with the mainstream of farming innovation, a circumstance that may account for occasional references to his having been something of a crank.

Tull designed a horse-drawn implement for cultivating (the “horse-hoe”), but his design for the horse-drawn seed drill was more important. He developed his first seed drill on his Howberry Farm prior to 1709, probably around 1701. Before devising it, he was aware that drilling seed rather than broadcasting it resulted in better germination and thereby saved expensive seed. Indeed, the advantages of drilling seed had been expounded as early as 1600 by Sir Hugh Plat near St. Albans, who accidentally discovered its effectiveness. Francis Maxey invented some sort of drill a few years later, and in 1639, Gabriel Plattes patented a drill that he proclaimed would increase yield by a hundredfold. Whether Tull was familiar with these efforts is not known, but he well may have been familiar with the Systema Agriculturae (1699) of John Worlidge, in which Worlidge described a design for a machine to form a furrow, drill the seed, and apply manure. Worlidge, however, never made his implement; a professor at Cambridge built a machine by Worlidge’s design in 1727, only to find that it performed none of the three tasks. Tull’s invention is regarded as original.

Tull became interested in devising a mechanical drill when his workers balked at his orders to hand-drill the sainfoin (a perennial legume, widely prized as nutritious feed for cattle). He said that he let his imagination play over every mechanical device he knew and settled on the groove, tongue, and spring in the soundboard of an organ as the basis for his machine.

Horse-drawn hoes and seed drills were not quickly adopted, because they were difficult to learn to use; even Tull never satisfactorily taught his workers to use them. By the early nineteenth century, Tull’s designs were being used for commercial manufacture, but even then the devices were not yet widely used. Tull himself observed that although his crops were better and his costs lower than those of his neighbors, they did not imitate him. It was not until the use of the seed drill drifted into the northern counties from Scotland, where it had been enthusiastically adopted, that it became widespread in England.

Tull published Supplement to the Essay on Horse-Hoing Husbandry in 1735, Addenda to the Essay in 1738, and Conclusion to the Essay in 1739. The chief purpose of these notes was to defend himself against charges that he had plagiarized Worlidge and others, attacks to which he was extremely sensitive. In 1743, a second edition of The Horse-Hoing Husbandry included the additions; a third edition was published in 1751 and a fourth in 1762. Between 1753 and 1757, a French translation appeared, and at Ferny, Voltaire numbered himself among the followers of Tull. William Cobbett edited an 1822 edition of Tull’s works.

Tull died at Prosperous Farm on February 21, 1741, and was buried at Basildon. He left four daughters and a son. The Royal Agricultural Society possesses a painting of Tull.

Significance

The delayed adoption of the seed drill fits the analysis set forth by J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay in The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880 (1966), in which individual experiments and publications, particularly during the first half of the eighteenth century, are downplayed. The question of the power of example in spreading the innovations in farming is paralleled by the question of the effectiveness of publications describing them. Here, also, any assessment of Jethro Tull’s impact must take into account a time lag, for the reorganization of English agriculture incorporating mixed farming, livestock improvement, and machinery became apparent only after about 1760, some thirty years after the first publication of The Horse-Hoing Husbandry. Even so, in The Farmer’s Kalendar (1771), the agricultural observer and writer Arthur Young acknowledged Tull’s impact when he condemned farmers who relied too narrowly on Tull’s principles, insisting (as Tull had said) that they were not effective in all soils or locations. Notwithstanding the importance of enclosures and other aspects of the reorganization of British farming, perhaps in the long view the most dramatic single effect of the work of Jethro Tull seen today is the commonplace practice of planting in rows or drills rather than the broadcast sowing, which was unchallenged until he provided the rationale and practical devices which challenged it.

Bibliography

Chambers, J. D., and G. E. Mingay. The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880. New York: Shocken Books, 1966. Brings together the copious research of the previous thirty years and offers an analysis emphasizing the improvement of soil fertility. Tull and other writers, with the exception of William Marshall, are less important than they were traditionally considered to have been.

DeBruyn, Frans. “Reading Virgil’s Georgics as Scientific Text: The Eighteenth-Century Debate Between Jethro Tull and Stephen Switzer.” ELH: English Literary History 71, no. 3 (Fall, 2004): 661-689. Compares agricultural theories in Tull’s The Horse-Hoing Husbandry with the views of Stephen Switzer, an eighteenth century garden designer who wrote numerous books about gardening.

Habakkuk, H. J. “Economic Functions of English Landowners in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 6 (1953): 90-99. Questions the significance of landlords and writers in spreading new farming practices and emphasizes tenant initiative.

Horn, Pamela. “Contribution of the Propagandist to Eighteenth-Century Agricultural Improvement.” Historical Journal 25 (June, 1982): 313-329. Acknowledging limits on the effectiveness of late eighteenth century agricultural writers, Horn nevertheless concludes that writings of the genre pioneered by Tull kept agricultural issues before the reading public during the height of agricultural change.

Jones, Eric L., ed. Agriculture and Economic Growth in England, 1650-1815. London: Methuen, 1967. Jones’s contribution to this collection of articles details the adoption of the farming techniques of the Low Countries, beginning in the late seventeenth century. Other contributors credit Tull with proving the efficiency of the new farming methods.

Mingay, G. E. English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. Synthesizes much work on the most powerful element of English society, to which Tull in a small way belonged. The landed interest is portrayed not so much as originating agricultural and other economic growth as providing conditions which fostered it.

Overton, Mark. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. This book makes only two brief references to Tull, but it provides valuable background for understanding English agriculture and the changes in farming that occurred during the eighteenth century.

Tull, Jethro. The Horse-Hoing Husbandry: Or, An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation. 1733. 4th ed. London: A. Millar, 1762. This fourth edition of Tull’s publication was perhaps the most influential.