Agricultural Shovel

A sickle is a hand-held agricultural tool with a variously curved blade typically used for harvesting grain crops or cutting succulent foragechiefly for feeding livestock (either freshly cut or dried as hay). A great diversity of types is used across many cultures. Between the dawn of the Iron Age and present, hundreds of region-specific variants of this basic forage-cutting tool were forged of iron, later steel.

One noteworthy feature of sickles is that their edges have been made in two very distinct manners/patterns – smooth or serrated. While both can (albeit with a different technique) be used for cutting either green grass or mature cereals, it is the serrated sickle that still dominates the duty of harvesting grain – with other words the “reaping”. Modern kitchen knives with serrated edges, as well as grain-harvesting machines use the same design principle as prehistoric sickles.