Seed drill further refined by Jethro Tull in 1701 in the Agricultural Revolution. However, seed drills of this and successive types were both expensive and unreliable, as well as fragile. Seed drills would not come into widespread use in Europe until the mid to late 19th century, when manufacturing advances such as machine tools, die forging and metal stamping allowed large scale precision manufacturing of metal parts. Early drills were small enough to be pulled by a single horse, and many of these remained in use into the 1930s. The availability of steam, and later gasoline tractors, however, saw the development of
The Seed Savers' Network peasants who have the skills and knowledge of its utilisation. Seeds with proprietary rights – plant variety rights – are not suitable for home seed saving as it is illegal to propagate from patented seed. Since its establishment in 1986, The Seed Savers' Network has collected and conserved local varieties within a network of gardeners who save and swap locally adapted seeds. From 1986 to 2008 it had a seed bank that received seed samples from around Australia. Over the space of eight years, culminating in 2008, that seed flow has been decentralised out to sub-groups, Local Seed Networks. These