scratch-work

Updated: May 25, 2025

"The truth is," he says, "that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and John Deere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merely scratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than those the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like, wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly make enough to subsist on."

Clarence Hamilton Poe - Where Half The World Is Waking Up : The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions