page_title: Michel Lullin de Chateauvieux
section_title: Drill plough
hierarchical_section_title: Michel Lullin de Chateauvieux / Work / Drill plough
caption_attribution_description: English: The complete Farmer, plate X
context_page_description: Michel Lullin de Châteauvieux was a Genevan nobleman, agronomist and experimenter on agriculture, known for the design of many agricultural instruments.
context_section_description: J. Balfour's Select Essays on Husbandry (1767), with extracts from the Museum Rusticum and other foreign essays on agriculture, mentioned the drill-ploughs invented by M. Duhamel and M. de Chateauvieux. 
  "The gentlemen abroad who are now promoting the new husbandry, have gone into the practice of planting three rows upon every ridge, supporting that to be the best method; and the drill-ploughs invented by M. Du Hamel, and M. de Chateauvieux, are constructed to sow three rows. Mr Mills also, the editor of M. Du Hamel's Husbandry, tells us, that he declined giving a description of Mr Tull's drill, because it was so complex, which, indeed, it was for lowing three rows; but, as it is now altered, is not so complicated as M. De Chateauvieux's drill, and is easily made a more general instrument for sowing upon ridges, or upon the level; and has this advantage beyond any of the foreign drills that I have seen, that, the two wheels which serve to turn the spindle, and deliver the seed, do, at the same time, mark the exact distances of the next rows to be drilled, upon level ground; so that a field, of any extent, may be planted with it, at the distances intended, with great exactness."
  Balfour concluded that "from the practice of the gentlemen abroad, and other instances that might be given at home, it is evident, that they have not seen the additions that Mr Tull made to his Essay, in which, besides his different method of drilling, there are several very material improvements in the manner of hoeing and cultivating wheat, and other crops; and from these last parts of his work may be also seen, that the reports of his bad success, in repeated wheat-crops, are without any just foundation."
  Beside the drill-plough, M. de Chateauvieux also developed a single cultivator, both described in John Mills's A New System of Practical Husbandry (1767). These works was later reviewed by Tobias George Smollett (1775). In his Letters concerning the present state of the French nation (1769) Arthur Young was far less positive. He criticised the design for his complex design and lack of maintainability, stating:
  "The drill plough, which M. de Chateauvieux recommends to his readers, and which he used himself, is a most complicate [sic] machine, infinitely difficult to make, any where, [sic] and impossible to repair in a village, besides the first cost of it, being very considerable.
  It must surely appear from these circumstances that all M. de Chateauvieux proves is, that a man when he has a drill plough given him, may use it if it wants no repairs to great advantage comparatively with the common husbandry, as already set forth. But it must be very apparent that multitudes of new experiments are yet necessary to prove the New husbandry (supposing a drill plough invented as simple as possible) equal to the old, where the latter is practised in a more advantageous manner, than about M. de Chateauvieux."
  Two years later Young (1771) explained that among his many experiments he did make a single cultivator based on M. de Chateauvieux's instructions with some additional improvements.
caption: Drill plough in The complete Farmer, plate X
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