Seed drill China, and later a seed drill by Jethro Tull that was influential in the growth of farming technology in recent centuries. Even for a century after Tull, hand sowing of grain remained common. In older methods of planting, a field is initially prepared with a plow to a series of linear cuts known as "furrows". The field is then seeded by throwing the seeds over the field, a method known as "manual broadcasting". The seeds may not be sown to the right depth nor the proper distance from one another. Seeds that land in the furrows have better protection from
Seed drill to plant seeds by hand. Besides being wasteful, planting was usually imprecise and led to a poor distribution of seeds, leading to low productivity. The use of a seed drill can improve the ratio of crop yield (seeds harvested per seed planted) by as much as nine times. Some machines for metering out seeds for planting are called planters. The concepts evolved from ancient Chinese practice and later evolved into mechanisms that pick up seeds from a bin and deposit them down a tube. Seed drills of earlier centuries included single-tube seed drills in Sumer and multi-tube seed drills in