and Jethro Tull's Horse-Hoeing Husbandry. Topics of The Complete Farmer Husbandry The preface of The Complete Farmer commands husbandry ahead of all human arts, which had "its birth with the world". It starts with: HUSBANDRY is, with great justice, placed at the head of human arts, as having a very great advantage over all others, both with regard to antiquity and usefulness. It had its birth with the world, and has always been the genuine source of solid wealth, and real treasures; for it will furnish a people with everything necessary to render life happy and desirable, form the principal revenues of the state, and even supply the defect of all others, when they happen to fail. A definition of husbandry can be found in the lemma on husbandry, which also appeared in Temple Henry Croker et al. (1764) The complete dictionary of arts and sciences,: HUSBANDRY, the business or employment of a farmer, or person who cultivates land, Bzc.Husbandry is divided into two kinds, and distinguished by the old and new. early times ; and the latter that introduced by the ingenious Mr. Tull, and often called the horse-hoeing husbandry.... The lemma on husbandry continues with a section on preparing the ground and the need of plowing, which also appeared in John Mills (1763) A New and Complete System of Practical Husbandry, stating: ... Experience shews, that land, though ever so well tilled in the autumn, when wheat for example, is sown, hardens and soddens in the winter; its particles, beaten down by heavy rains, and funk by their own own weight, approach each other daily more and more ; the roots of the plants cultivated have consequently less and less room to extend themselves in quest of their necessary food ; and the interstices in the earth become of course so few and close, that they are not able to pierce through them; whilst weeds spring up, and rob them of their nourishment. By this means the earth, reduced to nearly the fame condition as if it had not been ploughed at all, is unable to assist the plants sown in it in the spring, when they ought to shoot with the greatest vigour. They consequently then stand most of all in need of the plough, to destroy the weeds, to lay fresh earth to their roots in the room of that earth which they have exhausted, to