Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Surprising History of the Plow

Starting point is 00:00:00 For most of human history, growing food depended on one deceptively simple piece of technology. Over thousands of years, it evolved from little more than a sharpened stick into a machine that could transform entire landscapes, open new regions to farming, and support much, much larger populations. Its development helped shape settlement patterns, economies, and even the rise of civilizations. Learn more about the history of the humble plow on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery

Starting point is 00:00:59 and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. We make things just for college life, like the Rose and Mando blackout curtains in gray. They say you can't put a price on sleep, but we did for the low, low price of $49.99. Why are you in my room? Shh, go back to sleep.

Starting point is 00:01:35 You have a big exam tomorrow. Shop back to school at IKEA. Now before all of you think that this episode, is not going to be interesting and that the plow is something that isn't something to get excited about, I'd ask you to hold on for a minute. Most of us are not farmers. The percentage of people who are actively involved in agriculture today is only around 2% in the developed world. However, historically, that number was closer to 90%. The plow is not something that most of us are intimately familiar with. Yet it is one of the most important inventions in human history,

Starting point is 00:02:17 and that is no exaggeration. It was the plow that allowed us to develop large-scale agriculture, expand into marginal agricultural lands, and create a food surplus that made modern civilization possible. But before I get into the plow itself, I should first address the question, why do you need to plow in the first place? Imagine trying to plant wheat on an undisturbed field

Starting point is 00:02:42 covered with grasses, weeds, roots, and the remains of last year's vegetation. Simply scattering seeds onto the surface would yield poor inconsistent results. Most of the seeds wouldn't germinate and many of them would probably be eaten by birds. Plowing traditionally performs several jobs at once. First, it loosens the soil. Compacted soil can make it difficult for seedlings to establish roots. Lucent soil gives roots easier access to water, oxygen, and nutrients. Second, plowing creates a seed bed.

Starting point is 00:03:15 Seeds germinate most reliably when plant. at an appropriate depth and surrounded by reasonably loose soil rather than lying on hard ground. Third, plowing historically provided weed control. Turning the soil can uproot existing weeds and bury their vegetation. Fourth, a mold board plow can bury crop residues, manure, fertilizers, and organic material, mixing them into the upper soil. More on mold boards in a bit. And finally, fifth, plowing can temporarily alleviate some types of soil compaction and expose soil to air, accelerating biological and chemical processes that release nutrients. So there are a host of reasons to turn up the soil before you plant.

Starting point is 00:03:56 In fact, this is one of the first things that humans figured out when they started planting crops, and it was discovered independently around the world. The earliest farmers of the Neolithic period did not have plows. They cultivated relatively small plots using digging sticks, stone hose, and similar hand tools. And this works surprisingly well for a garden-scale agriculture, especially in loose soil, but it was extremely labor intensive. A person with a hoe can cultivate only a relatively small area. A hoe is probably the best option for someone today if you just have a small garden

Starting point is 00:04:30 plot that you want to till. However, if agriculture was going to support larger settlements, farmers needed some way to harness animal power. The earliest plows are what archaeologists usually call ards or scratch plows. The ard probably appeared in the ancient Near East sometime during the 4th millennium BC. An ard was little more than a pointed wooden stick attached to a beam. An ox or other draft animal pulled it through the soil while the farmer guided it from behind. Instead of turning the soil over, the ard scratched a narrow groove through it.

Starting point is 00:05:08 Think of it as a giant animal-powered digging stick. The great advantage was speed. A farmer could make long furrows far faster than people. People could prepare the same land using hose. Fields could therefore become much larger. The ard was particularly well suited to the relatively light, dry soils of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and parts of Southern Asia. Farmers could plow once in one direction and then again at right angles, producing a cross-hatched field. Many of these early ards may have actually been pulled by humans, but the plow became far more significant when combined with specialized draft

Starting point is 00:05:46 animals. Oxen were particularly important. Cattle could convert grass and crop residue that humans couldn't digest into mechanical power. A team of oxen could pull and implement much larger than anything a human could operate alone. The next important development was the plow share. The plow share, or sometimes just the share, is the cutting edge that slices horizontally through the soil. Early plow shares were wooden or tipped with stone or bone, but were eventually made of metal. And metal was transformative because soil is extraordinarily abrasive. Wooden points would wear down quickly. Bronze and especially iron allowed farmers to make thinner, stronger cutting surfaces that penetrated difficult soils. Iron agricultural implements became increasingly

Starting point is 00:06:35 common in several ancient civilizations. China became particularly advanced in the use of iron plow components. Archaeological evidence shows iron plow shares during the warring states period from roughly 475 to 221 BC. By the Han Dynasty, iron plow shares were widely used. While the plow share was an advancement, the biggest revolution in plow design was the transition from merely scratching the soil to actually turning it over. And this required the addition of the mold board. The mold board is the large, usually metal piece that lifts the resulting slice of soil, twists it, and flips it on one side. Instead of merely scratching a groove, the plow cuts out an elongated strip of soil and overturns it.

Starting point is 00:07:22 And that strip is called the furrow slice. The result is the familiar appearance of a freshly plowed field that you might see today. The biggest benefit of turning soil over is that it buries weeds, crop residue, and surface vegetation. Instead of merely cutting through them, the mold board flips the furrow slice, over, placing much of that material underneath the soil. This gives the next crop a relatively clean seedbed, and was especially valuable before modern herbicides. It also helps incorporate manure, lime, and other soil additives into the upper soil, rather than leaving them entirely on the surface. Turning can expose fresh soil, break up some compacted surface layers, and make subsequent

Starting point is 00:08:04 planting much easier. In heavier wet soils, moldboard plowing can also create furrows that improved drainage. Historically, this is one reason it was so useful in northern Europe, where simple scratch plows were poorly suited to dense clay soils. The colter was also in addition to plows. It was a blade in front of the plow share that made a narrow cut in the soil to reduce resistance for the rest of the plow. Another improvement involved not the plow itself, but its power source. oxen are strong and relatively easy to feed, but they're slow. During the Middle Ages, improvements in the horse collar and harness allowed horses to be used much more effectively for heavy draft work, and horses could generally work faster than

Starting point is 00:08:52 oxen. Combined with horseshoes and improved harness systems, horse-drawn plowing increased the amount of land that could be worked during the critical planting season. This mattered because there's usually only a limited window when soil, moisture and weather are suitable for both plowing and sewing. A farmer who could prepare more acreage during that window could cultivate a larger crop. These developments led to the creation of the Karuka, which was a heavy plow. And what set the heavy plow apart from other plows was the addition of wheels. This was a huge improvement because it allowed farmers to plow land that was previously difficult to plow. Much of northern France, Germany, the low countries, Britain, Poland, and

Starting point is 00:09:36 in Scandinavia all contain heavy wet clay soils. Consequently, many historians have argued that the heavy plow contributed substantially to the economic and demographic expansion of medieval northern Europe. Modern research has found a significant relationship between areas suited to heavy plow cultivation and later medieval population growth in urbanization. In effect, plow technology helped shift Europe's agricultural center of gravity northward. As plows got heavier, often required more animals to pull them. Six or eight draft animals were not uncommon.

Starting point is 00:10:13 While pulling a plow wasn't a problem, turning a plow became a real headache. Farmers therefore preferred to make long passes before having to turn. Fields consequently tended to be divided into long strips rather than small squares. This fit naturally into the medieval open field system where individual households cultivated strips on large communal fields. So plowing technology influenced not only agricultural productivity, but also the literal physical landscape and social organization of medieval villages. For centuries, plows were often built by local craftsmen.

Starting point is 00:10:50 There was no standardized scientific design. The curvature of the moldboard depended largely upon experience and local tradition. During the 17th and 18th centuries, European farmers, engineers, and agricultural reformers, increasingly tried to understand the plows geometry. The goal was to create a mold board that would turn soil smoothly while requiring as little pulling force as possible. And this became particularly important during the British Agricultural Revolution.

Starting point is 00:11:21 One important advance was the Rotherham Swing Plow developed in England in the early 18th century. Unlike many heavy-wheeled plows, it was lighter and easier to handle. Iron components increasingly replaced wood. This reduced the plow's overall weight, meaning that fewer animals could sometimes pull it. This was significant economically because draft animals were expensive to maintain. A plow requiring two horses instead of four could dramatically reduce a farmer's operating costs. The Scottish inventor James Small made another important advance during the late 18th century.

Starting point is 00:11:58 Rather than treating the mold board as an arbitrary curved piece of metal, metal, small experimented with its geometry. By the 1770s, he had developed an improved iron swing plow whose shape allowed it to cut and turn soil with less resistance. This was all part of a broader trend taking place during the agricultural revolution. Farm machinery was increasingly being engineered rather than simply crafted. Efficiency could be measured, draft resistance could be reduced, and parts could eventually be standardized. One person who was fascinated by moldboard geometry was Thomas Jefferson. He attempted to mathematically calculate an ideal mold board shape that would turn soil with minimal resistance.

Starting point is 00:12:44 Jefferson didn't invent the moldboard plow, but his experiments illustrate how agricultural technology was increasingly being treated as an engineering problem during the Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution made another major improvement possible. cheap standardized cast iron plow components rather than wrought iron. English inventor Robert Ransom developed improved cast iron plow shares during the late 18th century and later created hardened self-sharpening designs. Cast iron had several advantages. It could be poured in the molds, which meant manufacturers could produce nearly identical parts in large numbers. Broken components could be replaced rather than requiring an entire plow to be rebuilt by a local blacksmith.

Starting point is 00:13:28 A problem developed in the 19th century when homesteaders in the Great Plains tried to plow virgin prairie soil. Prairie soil was extraordinarily fertile, but it could be heavy and sticky. Its thick network of grassroots created tough sod, and soil often clung to cast iron mold boards. Farmers periodically had to stop and scrape the plow clean. But in 1837, an Illinois blacksmith named John Deere developed a commercially successful, self-scouring steel plow designed for prairie conditions. The critical feature was a smooth polished steel working surface. Instead of sticky prairie soil adhering to the mold board,

Starting point is 00:14:10 the soil slid across it polishing the surface even further. It was the steel plow that opened up what would become the most productive agricultural land on Earth. In this podcast, I've covered many inventions that have transformed human civilization. Take any one of them away in the world to be a very different place. And without question, one of the items that we have to put into the Everything Everywhere Hall of Fame of Things that made the world possible would have to be the plow. It isn't sexy, but we wouldn't be here without it. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

Starting point is 00:14:53 The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you two can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Surprising History of the Plow

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