CABI Blog

If you walk just for a few minutes up the river from CABI’s headquarters near Wallingford, UK, you come across Jethro Tull Gardens. For people of a certain age this causes some confusion – why should the council have seen fit to commemorate Ian Anderson’s prog rock band with a street name? A little further down the street is a clue – the 17^th-century house where the real Jethro Tull lived. It turns out that the band took the name from one of agriculture’s pioneers.

  
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull – sometime salmon farmer

but limited contribution to agricultural mechanisation

Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was very interested in the application of scientific method to agriculture. He noticed that hand-sown wheat seeds tended to be delivered in clumps rather than spaced at a more ideal even interval. His solution was a horse-drawn machine with a rotating cylinder with grooves cut in that meant an even flow of seeds were added as the machine was moved along. The seeds landed in three channels dug by a plough at the front of the machine, and then were covered up by a harrow at the back of the machine. This meant greatly reduced wastage of seeds.

 
Jethro Tull – church-organ vandal but major agricultural visionary

Tull’s prototype seed drill was built from the foot pedals of a local church organ. Tull’s was not the first seed drill, in that double-tube seed drills were in existence in China 2000 years earlier, and Italian inventors had patented simpler versions of the concept, but his took the idea to a new level of practicability. It was unpopular with farm workers who feared they would lose their jobs, and it appears that it was sabotaged. He later developed a horse-drawn hoe to remove weeds, which is described along with other ideas in “Horse-Hoeing Husbandry: An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Nutrition”. Tull is now seen as a major figure in the British Agricultural Revolution, but his ideas took a long time to gain acceptance.  Mechanised seed drills were not widely used until the 19^th century.

CABI moved to Wallingford in the 1980s with the aim of centralizing its expertise in the appliance of science to agriculture. So it was a good omen that 300 years earlier, a local farmer was doing something very similar.