Plough

• 1. Introduction

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  The plough appears in one of the oldest surviving pieces of written literature, from the 3rd millennium BC, where it is personified and debating with the hoe over which tool is better. That Sumerian disputation poem tells us something remarkable: even in deep antiquity, the plough was already important enough to argue about. It had already changed how human beings fed themselves, organised their land, and shared their labour. This is the story of a tool so fundamental to farming that it shaped field boundaries, village economies, and the very words we use to describe an acre of ground.

• 2. Before the Plough

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  Digging sticks and hoes were the original tools of agriculture. On the banks of the Nile, where annual floods refreshed the soil, farmers used them to cut furrows in which to plant seeds. Hoe cultivation was not invented in any single place. It was common everywhere agriculture was practised, and in tropical and sub-tropical regions marked by stony soils, steep slopes, and root crops, it remained the traditional method long after the plough arrived elsewhere.

  The Egyptian hoe known as the mr was pointed and strong enough to clear rocky soil, which is why tools like it are called hand-ards. The next step came from an unexpected quarter: the domestication of oxen in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilisation, perhaps as early as the 6th millennium BC. Draft animals gave farmers the pulling power to develop a larger implement, the ard or scratch plough. A ploughed field dating to around 2800 BC was found at Kalibangan in India, and a terracotta model of an early ard was recovered at Banawali, also in India, offering a rare physical record of what that first generation of ploughs looked like.

  The bow ard, the earliest form, consisted of a draft-pole pierced by a vertical pointed stick. One end served as the handle; the other was a cutting blade dragged through the topsoil. Because the ard left a strip of undisturbed earth between furrows, farmers often cross-ploughed their fields lengthwise and breadth-wise, which tended to produce the squarish shapes now called Celtic fields.

• 3. The Mould Board Breakthrough

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  The heavy iron mould-board plough was invented in China's Han Empire in the 1st and 2nd century, and from there it spread to the Netherlands, which led the Agricultural Revolution. The distinction from the ard was profound. Where the scratch plough merely cut a shallow groove, the mould board lifted an entire strip of sod and turned it upside-down into the adjacent furrow, burying weeds and crop remains while bringing fresh nutrients to the surface. Trenches cut this way are called furrows; the soil deposited upside-down rests at about 45 degrees against the back of the previous run.

  Chinese ploughs from Han times were efficient enough that the standard plough team required only two animals. In Europe, before the curved mould-board and other new design principles arrived in the 18th century, plough teams of four, six, or eight draught animals were common. That contrast mattered economically: in China, where much less animal power was required, fallows could be reduced, the arable area expanded, and a considerably larger population supported on the same amount of land. Pre-eighteenth-century European mould-boards were usually made of wood and straight, making them clumsy to pull.

  The Romans achieved a heavy-wheeled mould-board plough in the late 3rd and 4th century AD, with archaeological evidence appearing in Roman Britain. The first indisputable appearance of the heavy plough in a document after the Roman period is in a northern Italian text dated 643. General adoption of the carruca heavy plough in Europe accompanied the spread of the three-field system in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, and it was accompanied by the rise of larger fields called carucates, ploughlands, and plough gates.

• 4. Iron, Steel, and Self-Sharpening Shares

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  The earliest ploughs with a detachable, replaceable share date from around 1000 BC in the Ancient Near East. The earliest iron ploughshares appeared in China around 500 BC. In England, Joseph Foljambe in Rotherham used new shapes in 1730 to produce a lighter plough that covered the mould board with iron. The Rotherham swing plough consisted entirely of the coulter, mould board, and handles, and it may have been the first plough widely built in factories and commercially successful there.

  In 1789 Robert Ransome, an iron founder in Ipswich, began casting ploughshares in a disused malting at St Margaret's Ditches. A broken mould caused molten metal to contact cold metal, accidentally producing an extremely hard surface. Ransome recognised what had happened, named the process chilled casting, advertised the resulting tools as self-sharpening ploughs, and secured patents for the discovery.

  In the United States, Charles Newbold developed and patented a single-piece cast-iron plough. Jethro Wood, a blacksmith of Scipio, New York, improved on that with a three-part Scots plough whose broken pieces could be individually replaced. Then in 1837 John Deere introduced a polished steel plough; it was so much stronger than iron designs that it could work soils in US areas previously thought unsuitable for farming. Deere, working in Illinois, had noticed that a polished needle enters leather with greater ease than an unpolished one, and he experimented with portions of saw blades before settling on polished cast steel.

• 5. Power, Steam, and the Balance Plough

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  The mobile steam engine, available from about 1850, brought a new source of pulling power to the field. In Europe, soil conditions were often too soft to support a traction engine's weight, so engineers designed a different solution: the balance plough, drawn by cables stretched across fields by pairs of ploughing engines stationed on opposite edges. The balance plough carried two sets of facing ploughs arranged so that when one set worked the ground, the other was lifted in the air. At the end of each pass, the far engine pulled its cable, the plough tilted or balanced, and the other set of shares dropped into the soil for the return run.

  The man credited with inventing the ploughing engine and the associated balance plough in the mid-19th century was John Fowler, an English agricultural engineer. The Fisken brothers, however, demonstrated and went on to patent a balance plough roughly four years before Fowler. One notable producer of steam-powered ploughs was J. Kemna of Eastern Prussia, who became what sources describe as the leading steam plough company on the European continent, penetrating the monopoly of English companies on the world market at the start of the 20th century.

  Steam gave way to internal combustion in the early 20th century. The Petty Plough, a notable Australian invention of the 1930s, was designed specifically for ploughing out orchard strips, illustrating how specialised the technology had become.

• 6. Specialist Tools and Social Consequences

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  Richard Bowyer Smith and his brother Clarence Herbert Smith invented the stump-jump plough in 1876 in Australia. It was designed to break new farming land containing tree stumps and rocks too expensive to remove. A moveable weight held the ploughshare in position; when the share struck an obstruction, it was thrown up and clear, then returned to the ground once the obstacle had passed. The loy plough, by contrast, required only human effort. Used on small Irish farms where horses were unaffordable or terrain made them impractical, it was in use up until the 1960s, suited to the moist Irish climate and allowing potatoes to be grown in bogs and on mountain slopes.

  Mould-board ploughing in cold and temperate climates changed the land itself. It incorporated crop residues, limestone, and fertilisers into the soil, controlled perennial weeds, accelerated spring soil warming, and raised populations of soil-eating earthworms while reducing vertical-dwelling ones. But the same action left little crop residue on the surface, which might otherwise reduce both wind and water erosion. Over-ploughing could produce hardpan, a compacted layer broken only by a subsoiler acting as a long, sharp knife slicing through the hardened soil.

  The social consequences reached well beyond the field. In northern Europe, the mouldboard plough typically required cooperation between multiple households, since four to eight oxen were needed to pull it and this exceeded what a single peasant family could muster. Historian William H. McNeill argued that this enforced cooperation with non-family members was conducive to the prevalence of the corporation in medieval Europe. Peasants accustomed to entering into agreements outside the family were, he suggested, readier to form corporations when they moved to towns. The shape of fields also changed: because heavy ploughs needed up to eight oxen, which were difficult to turn frequently, fields became long and narrow, producing the strip landscape still visible in some European regions. The single-sided mould board, which could only turn soil to the right, meant fields had to be ploughed in long strips called lands, and the dimensions of those strips determined the traditional acre: a furlong (220 yards) by a chain (22 yards).

• 7. Ploughing's Uncertain Future

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  Chisel ploughs are becoming more popular as a primary tillage tool in row-crop farming, operating at depths from 15 cm to as much as 46 cm while leaving crop residue on top rather than burying it. Unlike the mould board, the chisel does not invert or turn the soil. That makes it a candidate for no-till and low-till farming practices seeking to keep organic matter on the surface throughout the year.

  The mole plough works in a different direction entirely, pulling a torpedo-shaped tip deep underground to leave a channel that acts as a drain without opening a trench. Modern mole ploughs can simultaneously bury a flexible perforated plastic pipe, making a permanent drain; similar machines are used under the sea to lay cables or to prepare the earth for side-scan sonar in oil exploration. Modern ploughs fitted with three-point linkage and hydraulic controls can carry as many as seven mould boards, with semi-mounted versions running as many as 18, adjusting furrow width and depth automatically.

  The word plough itself carries the weight of this long history. It derives from the Old Norse plógr, entering Germanic languages relatively late, and is thought to be a loan from one of the north Italic languages. The Latin text of Pliny records the Raetic word plaumorati, meaning wheeled heavy plough. That etymology points back to the same invention that changed field shapes and prompted the rise of the manorial system: the tool's very name preserves the memory of the moment the wheeled, heavy plough became common in Roman north-western Europe, by the 5th century AD.