Jethro Tull. Portrait of Jethro Tull (1674-1741), British agriculturalist. Educated at Oxford University, Tull trained to be a lawyer but after qualifying in 1699 he became a farmer instead. In 1701 he invented a seed drill which used a rotary mechanism to plant seeds in rows. This meant that less weeding needed to be done. Tull also stressed the need to allow water and air to reach the plants' roots and improved the design of the horse-drawn plough to accomplish this. Tull's techniques were published in 1731 in The New Horse Hoeing Husbandry: Or an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation. Tull's methods greatly improved agricultural efficiency.