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Sowing & Planting

A seed drill is a sowing device that precisely positions seeds in the soil and then covers them. Before the introduction of the seed drill, the common practice was to plant seeds by hand. Besides being wasteful, planting was very 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 by as much as eight times.

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Drilling is the term used for the mechanized sowing of an agricultural crop. A typical seed drill consists of a hopper of seeds arranged above a series of tubes that can be set at selected distances from each other to allow optimum growth of the resulting plants. in place of a hopper most commercial seeders use an air tank which uses a fan to create a vacuum which suck grain out of the tank meters it and blows grain into the drill. Arranged in front of the tubes are a series of knife blades known as coulters. In operation, the seed drill is dragged forward to allow the coulters to cut open the soil, with a metering mechanism on the hopper periodically allowing a number of seeds to fall into the tubes, and through them into the freshly cut soil. The result is a set of spaced seeding locations, which can then be covered by a built-in rake.

The seed drill allows farmers to sow seeds in well-spaced rows at specific depths at a specific seed rate; each tube creates a hole of a specific depth, drops in one or more seeds, and covers it over. This invention gave farmers much greater control over the depth that the seed was planted and the ability to cover the seeds without back-tracking. This greater control meant that seeds germinated consistently and in good soil. The result was an increased rate of germination, and a much-improved crop yield (up to eight times).

A further important consideration was 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 course of the growing season. Weeding by hand is laborious and poor weeding limits yield.