section_path: Important technological developments/Agriculture
section_name: Agriculture
paragraph_text: Agriculture
  
  The British Agricultural Revolution is considered one of the causes of the Industrial Revolution because improved agricultural productivity freed up workers to work in other sectors of the economy. In contrast, per-capita food supply in Europe was stagnant or declining and did not improve in some parts of Europe until the late 18th century.
  
  The English lawyer Jethro Tull invented an improved seed drill in 1701. It was a mechanical seeder that distributed seeds evenly across a plot of land and planted them at the correct depth. This was important because the yield of seeds harvested to seeds planted at that time was around four or five. Tull's seed drill was very expensive and not very reliable and therefore did not have much of an effect. Good quality seed drills were not produced until the mid 18th century.
  
  Joseph Foljambe's Rotherham plough of 1730 was the first commercially successful iron plough. The threshing machine, invented by the Scottish engineer Andrew Meikle in 1784, displaced hand threshing with a flail, a laborious job that took about one-quarter of agricultural labour. Lower labor requirements subsequently result in lowered wages and numbers of farm labourers, who faced near starvation, leading to the 1830 agricultural rebellion of the Swing Riots.
  
  Machine tools and metalworking techniques developed during the Industrial Revolution eventually resulted in precision manufacturing techniques in the late 19th century for mass-producing agricultural equipment, such as reapers, binders, and combine harvesters.