Items19The creator’s order
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Horse collarPut a horse in an ox yoke and any heavy load cuts off its wind. The padded collar spread the load across the shoulders and chest, away from the windpipe, and together with the nailed horseshoe it was in use in Europe by the 9th century.
That made the faster horse a real alternative to the ox at…0 - 2
PloughThe heavy moldboard plow of medieval northern Europe
The light scratch plow suited thin Mediterranean soils but struggled with the dense, wet clays of the north. The heavy plow added a moldboard that turned the sod over and threw it into high ridges, which drained those heavy soils far…0 - 3
Three-field systemInstead of resting half the land each year, medieval villages split it in three: an autumn crop, a spring crop and one field fallow. That alone brought an extra sixth of the arable into use every year.
The spring field grew peas, beans and lentils for people, plus oats and barley for horses. Those…0 - 4
Champa riceIn 1012, after a severe drought on the lower Yangtze and Huai rivers, Emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty (pictured) ordered thirty thousand bushels of a fast-ripening rice from the kingdom of Champa shipped to the stricken region.
It ripened in under a hundred days, needed less water than…0 - 5
Seed drillJethro Tull's horse-drawn seed drill, around 1701
Sowing by hand meant flinging seed across the field, and even skilled broadcasters wasted a great deal of grain. Around 1701 Jethro Tull built a horse-drawn drill that sowed three rows at once, added a horse hoe to work between them and spread his…0 - 6
Norfolk four-course systemWheat, then turnips, then barley, then a year of clover grazed or cut for feed. The Norfolk rotation dropped the fallow year altogether.
Turnips and clover kept more cattle and sheep fed through the winter, clover is a nitrogen-fixing legume, and the extra animals returned manure to the fields, so…0 - 7
Robert Bakewell (agriculturalist)Selective breeding of New Leicester sheep and Longhorn cattle
Before Bakewell, most livestock was bred for wool or work. After taking over the Dishley farm in Leicestershire in 1760, he selected, inbred and culled deliberately to fix a type, and produced the barrel-shaped New Leicester sheep, with…0 - 8
Threshing machineAndrew Meikle's drum threshing machine, patented in 1788
Beating grain out with a flail kept a large part of the farm workforce busy for months, and it provided up to half of a rural laborer's winter earnings. The machine Meikle (pictured) perfected took that work away.
The bill came due in 1830,…0 - 9
ReaperCyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper, 1831
Cutting grain with a cradle limited a man to about two acres a day, and a ripe crop does not wait. Cyrus McCormick publicly demonstrated his horse-drawn reaper in 1831, took his first patent in 1834 and moved production into a Chicago factory in 1847,…0 - 10
John Deere (inventor)Born Feb 7, 1804John Deere's polished steel plow, 1837
The tough, sticky soil of the Illinois prairie clung to cast-iron plows, so breaking new ground meant constant stops to scrape the blade clean. In 1837 Deere, a blacksmith in Grand Detour, made the first commercially successful steel plow, with a polished…0
