A seed drill is a device used in agriculture that sows seeds for crops by positioning them in the soil and burying them to a specific depth while being dragged by a tractor. This ensures that seeds will be distributed evenly.
The seed drill sows the seeds at the proper seeding rate and depth, ensuring that the seeds are covered by soil. This saves them from being eaten by birds and animals, or being dried up due to exposure to the sun. With seed drill machines, seeds are distributed in rows; this allows plants to get sufficient sunlight, nutrients from the soil.
Before the introduction of the seed drill, most seeds were planted by hand broadcasting, an imprecise and wasteful process with a poor distribution of seeds and low productivity. Use of a seed drill can improve the ratio of crop yield (seeds harvested per seed planted) by as much as eight times. The use of seed drill saves time and labor.
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 China,[1] and later a seed drill in 1701 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.
- ^ Temple, Robert; Needham, Joseph (1986). The Genius of China: 3000 years of science, discovery, and invention. New York: Simon and Schuster.