Seed drill

Jethro 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 ideas in The New Horse Houghing Husbandry in 1731. Rows are the real innovation: less seed thrown away, and weeding done by a horse rather than a crowd of hand hoers. Be warned that the machine itself was not widely adopted after he proved it worked. Its influence came through the drills that later makers built on the same idea.