The SAME Museum houses a ‘strange’ wooden object worn down by centuries and the work it performed with humans and animals. Seldom noticed, but often during visits, it is introduced as the most historical implement and emblem of agricultural work before the tractor. It is a 15th-century plough from northern Italy that resembles early Iron Age ploughs in shape.
Its history dates back a long way, to the birth of agriculture and its evolution.
Agriculture was one of the most significant milestones in human history, revolutionising our way of life, signalling the abandonment of nomadism, the emergence of settled communities and a new way of organising the economy, social relations, and the political structure. Cultivation of the land was also humanity’s first major attempt to control and dominate nature.
We know for sure that the emergence of agriculture radically transformed the lives of human beings, who until then had gathered in small nomadic groups, mostly families or clans, that mainly hunted and gathered fruits and roots. Hunting led these nuclei to move constantly, following the buffalo herds.
According to academics, the origins of agriculture date back some 15 to 10,000 years to the area of the Near East called the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq.
An old Tuscan saying goes, ‘the earth is low when alive and heavy when dead’; While it is easy to guess the meaning of the second part of the proverb, the first part, ‘low land’, stands for fatigue as the farmer continually bends to work the land. It was to ease this fatigue that, since prehistoric times, humans have sought ways to work on the land with tools designed help germinate, grow and develop plants essential for food needs.
Primitive man used sticks to pierce the soil and sow the seed, later modifying the tool to create inefficient hoes, which were inefficient in preparing the seedbed. This led to the invention of the plough by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC. It was a revolutionary event because it significantly increased agricultural productivity, enabling the creation of the food surpluses that were the basis for the genesis of complex societies based on the division of labour.
Ploughing is an ancient practice. The Latin poet Virgil considered it ‘the work of man and oxen capable of turning the earth’. Ploughs were then entirely made of wood, comprising a wooden hook with a shorter side that entered the ground and a longer side that served as a handlebar. They were symmetrical, meaning they opened a furrow in the ground by pushing the earth from the two sides; drawn by humans and later by animals, they worked 15-20 cm deep. It was necessary to remove the vegetation coverage several times in succession.
Ploughs then underwent thousands of years of evolution with modifications, adaptations and the use of tough metals to strengthen them.
Gold, silver, copper and bronze were the first metals that humans learned to work. However, they were too valuable or, as with bronze, too inelastic for agricultural use.
Iron technology was discovered in the Caucasus in the 15th century BC, spreading to the Middle East, Egypt and Greece in the 12th century BC and, in the 9th century, arriving in Italy, introduced by the Etruscans.
An abundance of iron opened up new horizons for agriculture: axes for cutting down forests, tools (pickaxes, spades, shovels, etc.) for reclaiming marshy areas, agricultural implements for loosening and working the soil, scythes for haymaking, tools for pruning, etc. The ploughs themselves soon came equipped with iron ploughshares that increased their effectiveness. Iron tools made it easier to construct chariots and boats, promoting trade and travel.
Attempting to improve the ploughing process further, the early years of the first millennium saw the introduction of a wooden cart with the plough’s drawbar fixed to its axle. Thus, for centuries, the most advanced peoples worked the land by plough and they changed little in appearance.
At the end of the 18th century, the first all-metal plough manufactured on an industrial scale appeared in America. Using iron led to the invention of an asymmetrical implement in England that turned the soil over, burying grass and any fertilising elements spread by humans and the remains of previous crops.
Thus, in the early 19th century, research and modernisations of the tool took place in Europe, seeking to improve the handling of the earth (the turning of the sod), decrease the tractive effort and thereby deepen the tillage. Other innovations concerned the cart’s stability, the shape and arrangement of the ploughshare, the surface of the mouldboard (the part of the plough that allows the sod cut vertically by the knife and horizontally by the ploughshare to rotate so that the part underneath it rises to the surface) and many others.
The plough with a steel ploughshare was followed in the second half of the 19th century by the two-wheeled plough with a driver’s seat, while from the 1890s, the first steam powered tractor ploughs were used. These gradually lost importance and were replaced by mechanically driven ploughs with two or more ploughshares, which entered use with the introduction of the tractor and the development of rubber tyres.
It is clear from this brief overview how ploughing has been the symbol of agriculture for thousands of years and is still the most frequent and demanding form of tillage. Let’s close with a significant fact about the current situation: It is estimated that almost 50% of the cost of the harvested crop is that of ploughing, no longer strenuous for human beings but still demanding for machines.
