Plough facts for kids

Two animals pulling a plow with a farmer behind it

A plow or plough is a simple machine used in farming. A plow is pulled across the ground by a human or animal. When pulled across the ground, the plow lifts up dirt and makes two lines of dirt behind it. The dirt lifted by the plow is more loose than before. Ground that has been plowed is a good place for a farmer to grow food.

Parts

Diagram – modern plough

Steel plough

The diagram (right) shows the basic parts of the modern plough:

1. beam
2. hitch (Brit: hake)
3. vertical regulator
4. coulter (knife coulter pictured, but disk coulter common)
5. chisel (foreshare)
6. share (mainshare)
7. mouldboard

Other parts not shown or labelled include the frog (or frame), runner, landside, shin, trashboard, and stilts (handles).

On modern ploughs and some older ploughs, the mouldboard is separate from the share and runner, so these parts can be replaced without replacing the mouldboard. Abrasion eventually destroys all parts of a plough that come into contact with the soil.

History

Early in the agricultural revolution, simple hand-held digging sticks or hoes would have been used in areas with good soil, such as the area near the Nile River in Africa. At the Nile, the annual flood makes the soil better by rejuvenating it, to create places where seeds could be planted. To help crops grow in areas where floods were rare, the soil had to be rejuvenated in a different way. This is when plowing was first used, and hoes were the first plows.

Images for kids

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  Traditional ploughing: a farmer works the land with horses and plough

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  13th century depiction of a ploughing peasant, Royal Library of Spain

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  Ancient Egyptian ard, c. 1200 BC. (Burial chamber of Sennedjem)

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  Farmers using a plough. Akkadian Empire seal, circa 2200 BC. Louvre Museum

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  Ploughing in Mysore, India

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  A reconstruction of a mouldboard plough

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  The mouldboard plow leaves distinct furrows (trenches) across the field.

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  A steel plough

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  19th century ploughs

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  Chinese iron plough with curved mouldboard, 1637

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  Modern tractor ploughing in South Africa. This plough has five non-reversible mouldboards. The fifth, empty furrow on the left may be filled by the first furrow of the next pass.

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  'A Champion ploughman', from Australia, c. 1900

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  Single-sided ploughing in a ploughing match

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  A four-furrow reversible Kverneland plough.

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  Early tractor-drawn two-furrow plough.

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  A German Kemna balance plough. The left-turning set of shares have just completed a pass, and the right-turning shares are about to enter the ground to return across the field.

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  Disc ploughs in Australia, c. 1900

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  A British woman ploughing on a World War I recruitment poster for the Women's Land Army.

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  A modern John Deere 8110 Farm Tractor using a chisel plough. The ploughing tines are at the rear, the refuse-cutting coulters at the front.

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  Bigham Brother Tomato Tiller

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  Back side of a 100 mark banknote issued 1908

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  1975 Italian lira coin

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  Robert Burns statue, Schenley Park, Pittsburgh

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  The Gefion Fountain in Copenhagen

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  Henry Herbert La Thangue, The Last Furrow, 1895

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  Ploughing in the Nivernais by Rosa Bonheur (1849)

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  Plough-usage was revolutionized with the advent of steam-locomotives (as seen in this German 1890s watercolor)

See also

In Spanish: Arado para niños