Irrigation was the dominant factor in the agriculture of Mesopotamia and Egypt: the rivers, when properly controlled, provided the necessary moisture and even carried deposits of rich new soil, which kept the land in good heart. The Romans, too, practiced irrigation on a large scale in Algeria, as the Arabs did later in Spain and Sicily, when they introduced rice, cotton, and the sugar-cane. But the Mediterranean area as a whole, and still more the heavy soils of northern Europe, required the application of quite different agricultural techniques.

Such countries as Greece and Italy have in the main light soil, torrential rivers, and a climate that combines regular drought in summer with short but heavy winter rains, which tend to wash essential plant nutrients out of the soil. Stock-raising land is scarce, so that soil fertility cannot readily be replenished with animal manure. The average crop yield in Roman times was not more than about fourfold, and to obtain this the land had to be left fallow in alternate years and pulverized before every crop. If labor costs permitted, the ground was dug, and in any case there were at least three ploughings--successively at right angles to each other and sometimes obliquely. It has been calculated that this method of preparing the ground doubled the quantity of moisture retained in the dry summer months.

The Greeks and Romans used a light plough, consisting of a pole to which the draught animals were attached; a curved beam joining the pole to the stock, which lay horizontally along the ground; and a single-handled stilt fixed at the plough-tail to guide it. The vulnerable part was the stock, which divided the soil and passed along the furrow. This was commonly made of oak, and its sides were sometimes protected by the insertion of pebbles into holes in the wood; but it was more important to protect the cutting point with a suitably hard shoe or share. The Egyptians are believed  to have used flint for this purpose but not, apparently, copper or bronze; the earliest iron ploughshares have been found in Palestine and date from the end of the second millennium B.C. Rather surprisingly, no iron shares have been traced to Hellenic sources, but they were widely used among the Romans, who had both a socketed and a less common tanged-spearhead type; they came to Britain in advance of Caesar.

The expansion of the Roman empire coincided with the climax of ancient Mediterranean agricultural technology, when advanced methods with better tools were being employed first on some of the great slave-worked estates and subsequently spread over the empire by tenant farmers. These advanced methods included a special attention to drainage, both to check the washing-away of valuable soil constituents in the rainy season and to render more cultivable such marshy areas as the Campagna or the Po valley. The Romans were, therefore, well able to organize the drainage of waterlogged areas in northern conquests like Holland and eastern Britain, where the main problem was not that of water conservation, as required in a region of low rainfall, but that of the inconveniences caused by abundant and irregular rains. The ploughing that was needed, however, was of a different kind from that suitable for the Mediterranean.

In the north, pulverization might ruin the ground; the proper object there was succinctly defined by James Small in 1784 as being 'to cut a slice of soil, to move it to one side, to turn it over'. Roman ploughs were, indeed, sometimes fitted with projecting groundrests, which pushed the loosened sod aside, or with a large iron coulter, which was wedged into a slot in the plough-beam and made a vertical cut, in contradistinction to the horizontal cut of the share. Nevertheless, there are finds in northern Europe, which may be pre-Roman, to suggest that the heavy plough was developed independently in the north to suit the needs of the heavy land which such peoples as the Belgae had set themselves to wrest from the primeval forest. Its characteristic features include a heavy square frame with plough-beam above and share-beam below, joined by a stilt at the back and by a brace or sheet immediately behind the share. A disputed passage in Pliny appears to state that a pair of wheels to support the beam was first introduced in the country south of the upper Danube and was in his day used also in Cisalpine Gaul. But the wheeled plough seems still to have been largely confined, even a millennium later, to the heavy clay soils won back from the forests, and has never completely ousted the swing plough: in 1523 Fitzherbert noted the greater cost of 'the ploughs that go with wheels'. Another very important innovation in Europe from the eleventh century onwards was a device that the Chinese appear to have adopted in an imported form 2,000 years before. This was the use of a mould-board of curved wood to overturn the sliced sod, which was often too heavy to be turned merely by the strength of the ploughman's arms. The shape varied greatly according to the nature of the soil and the crop to be grown in it.

In England, horses were little used in ploughing until the sixteenth century. Teams of eight oxen were a unit of reckoning rather  that an instrument of regular agricultural practice, and it was the four-ox team with ploughman and driver--the latter walking backwards in front of the team, plying his long goad--which slowly subdued the heavy lands of southern Britain. The process was effectively begun under the influence of the demands of the Roman corn-market, acquired a new impetus in the later Saxon centuries, and had been in the main completed by about 1300.

As regards other farm equipment, the influence of the Romans was strong, especially on the estates of the Church, which inherited their practice of repeated working of the soil. The Romans had harrow, developed from a frame of thorn branches. They were used first to tear out weeds, later for covering the seed, and in the Middle Ages to break up difficult ground and to supplement the work of the plough; much clod-crushing was also done with mallets. Rollers for improving the tilth were not used, except in a form of harrow  consisting of a cylinder of wood fitted with iron spikes. Wooden rakes were common in the Middle Ages, and from Roman times there were iron-shod wooden spades and iron picks and forks. A more important consequence of the use of iron was the development in succession of a balanced sickle, a short-handled scythe, and then the long scythe, which by the twelfth century already had the handle of the modern type. There was a striking difference from modern manual methods in the common habit of cutting corn near the top; Pliny even tells of a machine reaper, which worked on the principle of pushing a large comb and container breast-high into the corn.

The grain was separated from the ears by threshing with the hooves of animals, or with a board studded with flints, or with the jointed flail, which is first mentioned by St Jerome in the early fifth century A.D. The chaff was then removed by means of a winnowing fan, which was not originally a draught-making implement but the basket in which the grain was shaken. Four other items of farming equipment, which have scarcely changed since medieval, and indeed Roman, times are the hurdles of the sheep-fold; small drying kilns for corn that had been harvested unripe or wet; single-handed sheep shears; and the wooden ladder. . .

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