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
Seed drill rate of germination, and a much-improved crop yield (up to eight times). The use of a seed drill also facilitates weed control. Broadcast seeding results in a random array of growing crops, making it difficult to control weeds using any method other than hand weeding. A field planted using a seed drill is much more uniform, typically in rows, allowing weeding with the hoe during the growing season. Weeding by hand is laborious and inefficient. Poor weeding reduces crop yield, so this benefit is extremely significant. The ground would have to be plowed and harrowed. The plow would dig up