Jethro Tull (baptised 30 March 1674 – 21 February 1741, New Style) was an English agriculturist from Berkshire who helped to bring about the British Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century.

During his tour, Tull carefully compared the agriculture of France and Italy with that of his own country, and lost no chance to observe and note everything which supported his own views and discoveries.

On more than one occasion, he alluded in his work to the similarity of his own horse-hoe husbandry to the practice followed by the vine-dressers of the south of Europe in constantly hoeing or otherwise stirring their ground.

Finding that they did not approve of dunging their vineyards, Tull readily adduced the fact in favour of his own favourite theory: that manuring soil is an unnecessary operation.

[2][4] Tull died on 21 February 1741 at Prosperous Farm[3] and is buried in the graveyard of St Bartholomew's Church, Lower Basildon, Berkshire (now redundant), where he had been baptised.

"[10] Tull wrote with enthusiasm and carried his admiration of the powers of the earth to support vegetation too far; he was deceived, in fact, by the effects of his finely pulverising system of tillage, and did not sufficiently attend to the fact that there are many other substances in the commonly cultivated soils of the farmer besides the earths, and that so far from their being always the chief constituents of the soil, they very often form the smallest portion of even a highly productive field.

[10] That the four earths of which all cultivated soils are composed are all the necessary food or constituents of vegetables has, long since Tull wrote, been decided by accurate investigations of chemists.

He correctly enough told the farmers of his time, that as fine hoed ground is not so long soaked by rain, so the dews never suffer it to become perfectly dry.

His system was supported by Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau in France, Michel Lullin de Chateauvieux in Switzerland, John Mills in England, and many others.

At first the result was highly satisfactory; all the humus, by exposure to the air, was converted into soluble extract and taken up by the plants, which thrived well as long as the supply lasted: but in the end the soil was exhausted; and the warmest admirers and supporters of Tull's system, Du Hamel and De Chateauvieux, besides many others, found in practice that pulverising alone will not restore fertility.

[15] After Tull's death, his holdings of about 70 acres (28 ha) of freehold land in Berkshire found their way into Chancery, and were sold by order in 1784 to a Mr Blandy.

When it was cleared out some years ago, there was found under the accumulated mud of nearly a century a three-pronged hoe, which is likely to have belonged to Tull and is now in the museum of the Royal Agricultural Society of England.

[2] Tull's Prosperous Farm in the rural parish of Shalbourne, under the Coomb Hills about 4 miles (6 km) south of Hungerford, long remained an object of interest to lovers of agriculture.

[20] He not only accused Tull of plagiarizing his technological inventions from others, namely the horse hoe and drill, but also attacked him for his criticism of farming techniques found in Virgil's Georgics and his rejection of traditional, "Virgilian" husbandry.

[21] Throughout the 18th century, Georgics, a didactic poem written by the Roman poet Virgil in 37–30 BC, continued to hold great philosophical and cultural power in Britain, serving not merely as poetry but as manuals of husbandry and even scientific treatises.

[24] For two more volumes, Switzer fine-combs through The Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, mining Virgil for authoritative statements on agriculture and pouncing on apparently erroneous claims.

Tull's rejection of a traditional mode of agronomy in favour of self-experimentation, and Switzer's defence of classical authority marked the beginnings of an intellectual discussion around the field of agricultural science.