A plough (UK) or plow is a tool or farm implement used in farming for initial cultivation of soil in preparation for sowing seed or planting to loosen or turn the soil. Ploughs were traditionally drawn by working animals such as oxen and horses, but in modern times are mostly drawn by tractors. A plough may be made of wood, iron, or steel frame with an attached blade or stick used to cut the soil and loosen it. It has been a basic instrument for most of recorded history, although despite archeological evidence for its use written references to the plough do not appear in the English language before c. 1100, after which point it is referenced frequently. The plough represents one of the major agricultural inventions in human history. The earliest ploughs were wheelless, and the Romans used a wheelless plough called the aratrum, but Celtic peoples began using wheeled ploughs during the Roman era.
In agriculture, a harrow is an implement for breaking up and smoothing out the surface of the soil. In this way it is distinct in its effect from the plough, which is used for deeper tillage. Harrowing is often carried out on fields to follow the rough finish left by plowing operations. The purpose of this harrowing is generally to break up clods and to provide a finer finish, a good tilth or soil structure that is suitable for seedbed use. Coarser harrowing may also be used to remove weeds and to cover seed after sowing. Harrows differ from cultivators in that they disturb the whole surface of the soil, such as to prepare a seedbed, instead of disturbing only narrow trails that skirt crop rows.
A bulldozer is a crawler equipped with a substantial metal plate used to push large quantities of soil, sand, rubble, or other such material during construction or conversion work and typically equipped at the rear with a claw-like device to loosen densely compacted materials.
The three-point hitch is a widely used type of hitch for attaching ploughs and other implements to an agricultural or industrial tractor. The three points resemble either a triangle, or the letter A. Three-point attachment is the simplest and the only statically determinate way of joining two bodies in engineering.
A baler, most often called a hay baler is a piece of farm machinery used to compress a cut and raked crop into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport, and store. Often, bales are configured to dry and preserve some intrinsic value of the plants bundled. Several different types of balers are commonly used, each producing a different type of bale – rectangular or cylindrical, of various sizes, bound with twine, strapping, netting, or wire.
The roller is an agricultural tool used for flattening land or breaking up large clumps of soil, especially after ploughing or disc harrowing. Typically, rollers are pulled by tractors or, prior to mechanisation, a team of animals such as horses or oxen. As well as for agricultural purposes, rollers are used on cricket pitches and residential lawn areas.
A rake is a broom for outside use; a horticultural implement consisting of a toothed bar fixed transversely to a handle, or tines fixed to a handle, and used to collect leaves, hay, grass, etc., and in gardening, for loosening the soil, light weeding and levelling, removing dead grass from lawns, and generally for purposes performed in agriculture by the harrow.
The Reynolds-Alberta Museum, in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, Canada is one of 19 provincially owned and operated historic sites and museums. It traces the mechanization of Alberta's transportation, aviation, agricultural, and industrial past from the 1890s to present, as cars and trucks replaced horse-drawn buggies and wagons, huge factories replaced the village blacksmith shop, and mechanized equipment replaced animal and human-powered farm implements. The stories told by each exhibit reveal how the daily lives of Albertans were affected during this period of rapid change.
In soil science, agriculture and gardening, Hardpan or Soil pan is a dense layer of soil, usually found below the uppermost topsoil layer. There are different types of hardpan, all sharing the general characteristic of being a distinct soil layer that is largely impervious to water. Some hardpans are formed by deposits in the soil that fuse and bind the soil particles. These deposits can range from dissolved silica to matrices formed from iron oxides and calcium carbonate. Others are man-made, such as hardpan formed by compaction from repeated plowing, particularly with moldboard plows, or by heavy traffic or pollution.
A cultivator is any of several types of farm implement used for secondary tillage. One sense of the name refers to frames with teeth that pierce the soil as they are dragged through it linearly. Another sense refers to machines that use rotary motion of disks or teeth to accomplish a similar result. The rotary tiller is a principal example.
A trencher is a piece of construction equipment used to dig trenches, especially for laying pipes or electrical cables, for installing drainage, or in preparation for trench warfare. Trenchers may range in size from walk-behind models, to attachments for a skid loader or tractor, to very heavy tracked heavy equipment.
A subsoiler or flat lifter is a tractor-mounted farm implement used for deep tillage, loosening and breaking up soil at depths below the levels worked by moldboard ploughs, disc harrows, or rototillers. Most such tools will break up and turn over surface soil to a depth of 15–20 cm (5.9–7.9 in), whereas a subsoiler will break up and loosen soil to twice those depths. Typically a subsoiler mounted on a compact utility tractor will reach depths of about 30 cm (12 in) and typically have only one thin blade with a sharpened tip.
Two-wheel tractor or walking tractor French: motoculteur German: Einachsschlepper oder Bodenfräse are generic terms understood in the USA and in parts of Europe to represent a single-axle tractor, which is a tractor with one axle, self-powered and self-propelled, which can pull and power various farm implements such as a trailer, cultivator or harrow, a plough, or various seeders and harvesters. The operator usually walks behind it or rides the implement being towed. Similar terms are mistakenly applied to the household rotary tiller or power tiller; although these may be wheeled and/or self-propelled, they are not tailored for towing implements. A two-wheeled tractor specializes in pulling any of numerous types of implements, whereas rotary tillers specialize in soil tillage with their dedicated digging tools. This article concerns two-wheeled tractors as distinguished from such tillers.
A planter is a farm implement, usually towed behind a tractor, that sows (plants) seeds in rows throughout a field. It is connected to the tractor with a drawbar or a three-point hitch. Planters lay the seeds down in precise manner along rows. Planters vary greatly in size, from 1 row to 54, with the biggest in the world being the 48-row John Deere DB120. Such larger and newer planters comprise multiple modules called row units. The row units are spaced evenly along the planter at intervals that vary widely by crop and locale. The most common row spacing in the United States today is 30 inches.
Agricultural machinery is machinery used in farming or other agriculture. There are many types of such equipment, from hand tools and power tools to tractors and the countless kinds of farm implements that they tow or operate. Diverse arrays of equipment are used in both organic and nonorganic farming. Especially since the advent of mechanised agriculture, agricultural machinery is an indispensable part of how the world is fed.
