Gallic reaper and Chinese seed drill widespread.

WI the Gallic reaper and Chinese seed drill became ubiquituous rather than vanishing and remaining in China? The reaper was more manpower efficent than hand harvesting, and the seed drill improved yeilds.

IOTL the English agricultural revolution provided the food for population growth and freed up people for the industrial revolution. Would a less dramatic version of this happen as a result of these two machines being standard equipment on farms throughout Eurasia from 500AD? Would centralised empires like Byzantium, Persia, China etc benefit more from these machines than the fragmented polities prevalent in Europe and India? Would warfare be much different if the harvest was not gathered by masses of people?
 
WI the Gallic reaper and Chinese seed drill became ubiquituous rather than vanishing and remaining in China? The reaper was more manpower efficent than hand harvesting, and the seed drill improved yeilds.

IOTL the English agricultural revolution provided the food for population growth and freed up people for the industrial revolution. Would a less dramatic version of this happen as a result of these two machines being standard equipment on farms throughout Eurasia from 500AD? Would centralised empires like Byzantium, Persia, China etc benefit more from these machines than the fragmented polities prevalent in Europe and India? Would warfare be much different if the harvest was not gathered by masses of people?
One of the problems with automatic reaping machines is that they can be more wasteful. They really have to work very well or they are not attractive. Maybe the Gallic reaper is massively improved to something like the McCormick Reaper. It would have been theoritically possible in the pre-industrial age.
 
Come to think of it the common scythe would've been quite important if retained. Its said the scythe was invented by the Scythians and it spread to the Romans. But it then disappeared in Europe only to reemerge in the Middle Ages.

What if the scythe was not only further popularized but the grain cradle was developed out of it? Its a very simple technology that would save considerable labour.
 
The cradle scythe reduces labour by making the cut grain easier to bind. But I've read that it difficult to use well and is best used by big strong men. I don't think this would considerably reduce the time and labour needed to gather the harvest, freeing up this manpower for other things.

From what I understand the Gallic reaper was manpower efficient for several reasons. It made use of the draught animals on the farm, was faster than by hand, only harvested the heads for reduced threshing effort, and carried the harvested grain to the row end for collection. However I do wonder what happens to the stubble which has a lot of uses?

What about the seed drill used in combination?
 
I rather suspect there are efficiency versus yield issues involved - reaping wioth a scythe is a net gain only if you can afford a greater loss of grains for your reduced manpower input. The same is true for reaping technologies. The traditional medieval hand sickle method is designed to minimise loss at the price of much greater labour input.
The other thing is that these things are capital-intensive. That need not be a big problem, but prior to the emergence of the village community, it may make the innovations prohibitively expensive for smallholders. Though if it were to happen, it would change the social structure of the rural population. creating a permanent rural proletariat and a smaller group of machine-owners. What this would lead to is a different question. Perhaps the corttars would turn to other, more labour-intensive market-oriented production. Manby of them would still provide labour requireed on the land, but the playing field just got a lot less level.
 
The scythe was mostly used for barley and oats anyways. The grain cradle, the improved scythe, was used well into the 20th century on small farms despite competition from mechanized reapers and combines.
 
How much land would a family (?) need to afford a mechanical seed drill and reaper?

That deprends on the general productivity of agriculture in the area and the cosat of labour and materials, but generally, think of it in these terms:

A reaper and seed drill will cost you asmuch high-quality wood as it takes to make a small hut or footbridge, and as much metal as it takes to make a small watermill or a equip a peasant household, plus the labopur costs to have it made and maintained. I estimate that if the wood is bought or provided as ready-to-use timber, it will still be easily 50 hours of woodworking and assemply with hand tools, plus the crafting of the metal (the cost comes in as labour or through purchase). Maybe half of that can be provided by the peasant family, the other is certainly skilled craft.

It requires you to have at least one, more likely a team of, draught animals (if you go in conjunction with a wheeled mouldboard plogh, a team). These cost upkeep and consume labour and resources that will not now go to egg-producing chickens, milk-producing cows, wool-producing sheep or meat-producing pigs.

In order for that to be worthwhile, a machine-owning unit (family, village, manor or whatever) needs to have enough land under the plough to offset *in productivity gains* both the efficiency loss and the purchase and upkeep of the machine. In late medieval central Germany, a rule of thumb was that the richest two or three families in a village owned a mouldboard plough and team, the others rented it from them.
 

Hecatee

Donor
A big element to remember is that the gallic reaper used a donkey or an ass for pushing the reaper through the fields, not a (somewhat rarer and more costly) ox. The donkey could then be used for many other tasks but can't take the heavy burden oxen can shoulder, be it for heavy labour or for charriot pulling in long distance transport.

In view of that small detail we can think that the gallic reaper would be used more often near the mediterranean and not in the frankish realm who would discover them back in the 8th or 9th century.
 
I was thinking that perhaps the sort of person who would qualify as a thematic cataphract, ie owning land worth a pound of gold, would be able to afford these two machines. Thus they would be present in their thousands in the Empire, standard equipment on your average middle-class farm.
 

The Sandman

Banned
Two questions.

First, wasn't there also a major development in plow technology in the Late Middle Ages that made land much more productive? And if so, could that also be adopted sooner?

Second, why isn't anyone considering the possibility of something akin to the farmer's grange showing up in response to the appearance of new and capital-intensive farming technology?
 
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