Horse-hoeing husbandry : $b or, an essay on the principles of vegetation and tillage. Designed to introduce a new method of culture; whereby the produce of land will be increased, and the usual expence lessened. Together with accurate descriptions and cuts of the instruments employed in it.Tull, Jethro
Science
Horse-hoeing husbandry : $b or, an essay on the principles of vegetation and tillage. Designed to introduce a new method of culture; whereby the produce of land will be increased, and the usual expence lessened. Together with accurate descriptions and cuts of the instruments employed in it.
Tull, Jethro
Agriculture -- Early works to 1800; Plows; Tillage
In wide Intervals, we can raise a good Crop with less Labour, less
Seed, no Dung, no Fallow, but not without a competent Quantity of
Earth, which is the least expensive of any thing given to Corn; the
Earth of a whole good Acre being but about the Tenth Part of the common
Expence; and of indifferent Land, a Twentieth; and such I count that of
Five Shillings and Six-pence _per_ Acre.
The Crop enjoys all the Earth; for betwixt the last Hoeing, and the
Harvest, there remains nothing but Space empty of Mould in the Middle
of the Intervals.
’Tis an Objection, that great Part of those wide Intervals must
be lost[137], because the Wheat-roots do not reach it; but as we
generally turn the Mould towards the Row at the last Hoeings, there is
no Part of it above Two Feet distant from even the middle Row, and
Seventeen Inches from either of the outside Rows.
[137] They do reach through all the Mould (as shall be proved
by-and-by); and yet may leave sufficient Pasture behind; because it
is impossible for them to come into Contact with all the Mould in
One Year; no more than when Ten Horses are put into an Hundred Acres
of good Pasture, their Mouths come into Contact with all the Grass
to eat it in one Summer, though they will go all over it, as the
Vine-roots go all over the Soil of a Vineyard without exhausting it
all; because those Roots feed only such a bare competent Quantity of
Plants, which do not overstock their Pasture.
The Superficies of the fibrous Roots of a proper Number of
Wheat-plants bear a very small Proportion to the Superficies of the
fine Parts of the pulverized Earth they feed on in these Intervals;
for one cubical Foot of this Earth may, as is shewn in _p._ 29. have
many thousand Feet of internal Superficies: But this is in proportion
to the Degree of its Pulveration: and that Degree may be such as is
sufficient to maintain a competent Number of Wheat-plants, without
over-exhausting the vegetable Pasture, but not sufficient to maintain
those, and a great Stock of Weeds besides, without over-exhausting
it. And this was plainly seen in a Field of Wheat drilled on
_Six-feet_ Ridges, when the South Ends of some of the Ridges, and the
North Ends of others, had their Partitions Hand hoed, and cleansed
of Weeds, early in the Spring, the opposite Ends remaining full of a
small _Species_ of Weeds, called _Crow-needles_, which so exhausted
the whole Intervals of the weedy Part of the Ridges, that the next
Year the whole Field being drilled again with Wheat exactly in
the Middle of the last Intervals, the following Crop very plainly
distinguished how far each Ridge had its Partitions made clean of
those small Weeds in the Spring, from the other End where the Weeds
remained till full-grown; the Crop of the former was twice as good as
that of the latter, even where both were cleansed of Weeds the next
_Spring_. This Crop standing only upon that Part of the Mould, which
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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