The rotary tiller was born on an Australian farm using a steam tractor
In 1912 a young Australian named Arthur Clifford Howard began spinning blades through the soil on his father's farm at Gilgandra, New South Wales, powered by the family steam tractor. He discovered that mechanical tilling loosened the ground without packing it down the way ploughing did.
Howard's first machines flung soil sideways. He fixed that with L-shaped blades mounted on widely spaced flanges around a small rotor. In March 1922 he founded Austral Auto Cultivators, later Howard Auto Cultivators, based in the Sydney suburb of Northmead from 1927. When export demand outgrew Australian production in the 1930s, he went to England and in July 1938 launched a firm called Rotary Hoes at East Horndon in Essex, with branches that eventually reached from the United States to Malaysia. The Danish Thrige Agro Group bought the business in 1985.
A cultivator does secondary tillage: it stirs and breaks up soil either before planting, to make a loose seedbed, or among growing crops to kill weeds by uprooting them or burying their leaves. Unlike a harrow, which disturbs the entire surface, a cultivator works in careful patterns that spare the crop rows. Toothed cultivators resemble chisel ploughs, but their tines stay near the surface, while chisel plough shanks reach deep to break hardened ground.
Scratching soil to control weeds goes back millennia to the hoe and plough, and harrows came from ganging hoes behind draft animals. Designs multiplied during the Industrial Revolution. In the 1910s affordable tractors like the Fordson reached family farms, but cultivating was an afterthought in its design, leaving an opening for inventors between 1915 and 1920.
Herbicides, widely commercialised in the 1950s and 1960s amid optimism that chemistry would sweep away old methods, sharply reduced mechanical weeding, and in some cases they were adopted too heavily and hastily. Cultivators remain important where herbicides are unwanted, as in organic farming. Industrial models range from 3 to 24 metres wide, many with hydraulic wings that fold up for road travel, and draft animals still pull cultivators in parts of the developing world.
Source: Cultivator
