Hoe′ing ma-chine′.
（
Agriculture.) An implement for tending drilled or dibbled crops.
It was invented by
Jethro Tull, the introducer of the system of drilled crops into
England, and was designed to diminish the expense of cultivation by substituting horse labor.
Tull's implement was comparatively rude, and it was successively improved by a number of inventors, among whom we notice the names of
Blackie, the
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two Wilkies,
Weir,
Hayward,
Grant, Ganett,
Howard, and others in Britain.
The history merges into the history of
cultivators, in the
United States our husbandry being different.
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Hoes. |
The great breadth planted to corn and cotton, and the necessity for frequent plowings, havegiven a different form to the tool, as the distance between the rows renders it convenient for the horse, implement, and man to follow the balk, going twice in a row, tending the crop to his right hand each time.
This is very different from the hoeing of wheat, and also from the hoeing of turnips.
The horse-hoes (
b) of Britain have a range of shares spaced like the drills, so as to work in the intervals between the rows of plants, such as wheat and turnips.
Others of their horse-hoes are for the culture of plants requiring a greater width, such as mangel-wurzel, cabbages, and beans.
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Hoeing-machines. |
The English horse-hoes
a c have caster wheels in front and rear, a broad middle share, and two or more side shares.
The rear share may be curved or flat, as shown at
c and
a respectively.
It is what we should call a cultivator, but there is more of it than we regard convenient.
If the tool be well proportioned, and the animal hitched to it rightly, it
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needs no wheel.
For turning at the end of a row of corn or potatoes it is too long.
A man would need 12 feet of ground to come out on to turn, and it is not necessary to withdraw so large a marginal strip of the field for such a purpose.
See cultivator.
Bucknalls's horse-hoe
b (
English) has a gang of 10 shares in a frame, adjustable by a lever as to hight, and also as to angular presentation of the shares to the ground.
It is intended for hoeing wheat.
An implement used for chopping gaps in drilled rows of plants was described by Skirving of Fifeshire,
Scotland, in 1778, and constructed by Huckvale some 25 years since (
d,
Fig. 2521). It was designed for turnip culture, and is also used in cotton culture.
In each case the seed is sown somewhat abundantly in drills, and requires to be thinned after having attained such size as to bear culture.
The practice with cotton has been to cut gaps in the rows with a hoe, leaving the plants in square bunches, which are afterward thinned out to a few plants, and eventually, when the contingencies of insect enemies are overpast, leaving the most likely plant in fall possession of the hill.
This
horse-hoe is designed for chopping gaps in the rows, and has a set of revolving hoes on a shaft parallel with the line of draft, and driven by bevel gearing from the main axle of the machine.
As the machine advances, the hoes chop transversely across the row of plants, making intervals therein equal to the lengths of the blades.
See cotton-chopper.
