Devin Foote is a 24-year-old beginning farmer at Common Ground Farm in Beacon, New York. Throughout the growing season, Devin will be chronicling his experiences as a young farmer growing for a local food system.
May 5, 2009
The plow is perhaps the greatest attempt to imitate the hand. The harrow drags its fingers through the soil, loosening and breaking clods. Although harrows were once nothing but a rack of sharpened sticks drawn behind an ox, they are the same in principle today, despite a change to sharper and more durable metal materials. Plows, little changed over 4,000 years of existence, have increasingly sought to hold the curve of the human hand and to imitate its trick of both pulling up and laying down.
The 18th century New York inventor Jethro Wood made arguably the finest plow. Wood was obsessed with finding the curve that would lift and turn the soil with the least resistance, making the plow easiest to draw.
He was not alone in this quest. His sometime correspondent, President Thomas Jefferson, was also in pursuit of “the mould-board of least resistance” and indeed thought that he had found it. But Jefferson designed on paper, using a grid. Jethro Wood designed on potatoes.
People who saw him walking the lanes of his hometown of Scipio, carving away on a spud, soon came to know him as “the whittling Yankee.” His plow was not a product of the Cartesian grid, but rather, was formed directly on a product of the soil.
In a letter to the Patent Office of 1819, Wood repeatedly tries to describe his mouldboard, without success. “The figure of the mouldboard… is a sort of irregular pentagon, or five-sided plane, though curved and inclined in a peculiar manner,” he said. “The peculiar curve has been compared to that of the screw auger; and it has been likened to the prow of a ship,” he added, but neither description was accurate. Finally, he gave up trying to describe it in detail: “The mouldboard, which is the result of profound reflection and of numberless experiments, is a sort of plano-curvilinear surface.”
He then went on to provide a web of measurements so obscure that the document functioned only weakly as a patent, meaning that although his design was almost universally adopted, he saw little revenue as a result.
During the course of ten days, we have put all of our potatoes in the ground. Six hundred pounds of potatoes and 11 varieties in all. I used Wood’s (not Jefferson's) mouldboard shape to test its usefulness in turning over a beautiful cover crop of hairy vetch. Aside, we have been busy with planting and the season of continuous cultivation has begun. Now until September... .
