Hoe (redirected from hoes)

hoe, usually a flat blade, variously shaped, set in a long wooden handle and used primarily for weeding and for loosening the soil. It was the first distinctly agricultural implement. The earliest hoes were forked sticks. Heavy flaked-stone implements mounted with bitumen were used in Mesopotamia in the 5th millennium B.C. They occur together with flint-bladed sickles and grinding stones—all of which are indications of farming settlements. Hoe blades were made of animal antlers and scapulae, or shoulder blades, and of shells. Variations on the hoe, such as the pick, the adz, and the plow, appeared as the blade progressed from stone to copper, bronze, iron, and steel. Modern garden hoes are of two types, the drag hoe and the thrust hoe. Truck farms use light scraping hoes, chopping hoes, and multibladed hoes, and in large-scale agriculture a cultivating implement called a rotary hoe is used for weeding. The hoe symbolizes the garden horticulture that sustained high civilizations, such as those of pre-Columbian America.

Bibliography

See M. Partridge, Farm Tools Through the Ages (1973).

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hoe [hō]

(design engineering)

An implement consisting of a long handle with a thin, flat, straight-edged blade attached transversely to the end; used for cultivating and weeding.

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backhoe

backhoe attachment on a crane

An excavating machine for cutting trenches; a boom-mounted bucket moves toward the machine, cutting the ground like a hoe; then the machine turns away from the cut to permit the operator to dump the soil.

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Hoe 

(in Russian, motyga; also motyka, sapka, tsapka, and tiapka), a manual agricultural tool for loosening the soil and killing weeds. It consists of a working element and a wooden handle set perpendicular to it. Hoes appeared in the early farming cultures of the Neolithic period (at first in Southwest Asia, and then, with the spread of agriculture, in other countries). The working part of early hoes was made of hard wood, rock, bone, horn, and carapaces of turtles; those of modern hoes are made of steel. With the appearance of plowing implements, hoes came to be used primarily in caring for growing plants. Only among certain peoples in the tropical forest zones of Africa and South-east Asia do they continue to be used as the primary implement for tillage.