British agriculturalist, 1674-1741; he was among the first to promote
modern farming methods in
Britain, including the use the of the
iron plow. Around the turn of the century, he invented a
horse-drawn automatic
seed drill with an
iron plow (the fore-runner of the improved cast-iron plow, invented in the 1790's), which
furrowed the fields and deposited the seeds in linear rows to an acceptable depth, where they would not be picked off by
birds and
beasts and still have enough soil to grow well. This automation, accompanied by the beginnings of wide-spread use of
fertilizer and crop rotation, significantly reduced the amount of seed and
labour necessary, allowed weeding around the linear furrows, and increased England's crop
yield, paving the way for the
population growth and later projects of the
industrial revolution.
To my knowledge, Ian Anderson chose the name because it sounded cool, without any particular reference to Mr. Tull's historical importance.