Plant Production Sub-Collection II

History of the Sub-Collection

This sub-collection forms the core of collections of the National Museum of Agriculture. It is the oldest part of its collections, which started to develop immediately after the museum’s formation. The oldest part of this group of items consists of objects exhibited at the Jubilee and the Ethnographic Exhibition, which were passed on to the museum through the Ethnographic Society in the 1920s. Still in the interwar period, concerted effort was made to create a representative collection of historic ploughs: it is nowadays one of the largest such collections in the world. Plant production collections were considerably enriched after 1945, when the museum took over the collections of then dissolved agricultural museums in Opava and Brno. In the 1950s, the hitherto small group of models of agricultural implements was enriched by the addition of a large collection of teaching models of machines and implements from agricultural schools, especially from a former agricultural academy in Tábor. In the 1960s and partly also in the 1970s, collections were systematically supplemented by field collections of items typical for the various regions of the Czech Republic. In the 1970s, the collection started to include some more modern agricultural machinery from the socialist era, and this trend continued until the late 1980s and early 1990s. With the growth of private ownership in the 1990s, the collection’s growth had almost stopped. At the moment, it includes approximately 1,200 machines and tools and about 600 models.

Important Items Belonging to the Sub-Collection

Cousins Veverka turning plough, Wunderlich’s seeding machine.