agricultural revolution

agricultural revolution. This was traditionally regarded as a movement which took place simultaneously with the industrial revolution, and involved the invention and introduction of new crop rotations in which roots and artificial crops were cultivated, and which involved also improvements in livestock breeding, and the reorganization of the land as a result of parliamentary enclosure. Taken together, these changes were held to have raised the output and productivity of land in such a way that the population was fed (with some help from imports) without resort to massive labour inputs which would have slowed down the industrial revolution by restricting the flow of labour from the countryside to the town. Consequently agricultural productivity and labour productivity must both have risen; indeed, the twin achievements of 18th- and 19th-cent. agriculture are seen as the ability to match population growth with rising agricultural production, and structural economic change with major gains in labour productivity.

Without much doubt the end results deduced by this argument are correct. Food supply did more or less keep pace with population and urbanization, although there was some slack in demand c.1750 and a shortfall by 1815 of about 5 per cent, which was largely met by importing grain from Ireland. By 1850 an estimated 6.5 million extra mouths were being fed from home production compared with 1750. However, questions have been raised about the nature, and particularly the timing, of the agricultural revolution. Originally it was believed to have taken place alongside, and to have been a necessary concomitant to, the industrial revolution. Recent research has raised questions about this linkage. Although there is general agreement that English agriculture underwent a fundamental technological transformation between the mid-16th and the mid-19th cents. which had a decisive impact on ‘productivity’ in terms of grain yields per acre, the timing and mechanics of this transformation remain in question.

Modern understanding of the agricultural revolution sees it loosely as a three-stage, overlapping, process. The first phase, completed by c.1750–70, saw two developments: first, the introduction of new crops, particularly root crops such as turnips and swedes, and legumes such as clover, trefoil, and lucerne, which could be grown in the fields between grain crops; and second, a considerable rise in the productivity of labour. As a result of these changes less land needed to be left fallow in order to restore its fertility, additional animal feedstuffs were grown allowing farmers to keep more cattle, and greater quantities (and quality) of manure became available. Farmers acted empirically because the scientific principles behind this process of fixing the nitrogen in the soil were not understood until well into the 19th cent., but from early beginnings in Norfolk the new crops were gradually adopted across the country. At the same time, rising labour productivity ensured that the new farming was not a drain on industrial production.

During the second phase of the agricultural revolution, lasting from around 1750 to 1830, demand increased rapidly. In this period the slack in the agricultural economy which had been partly taken up by grain exports disappeared and by the early 19th cent. an import balance existed despite a considerable growth in output. Few new crops were introduced in this period, but the reorganization of the land through enclosure (first by agreement and then by parliamentary means), and the gradual growth of larger farms, with their savings on capital inputs and their supposed higher quality of husbandry, brought a slow rise in productivity, and a growing trend towards regional specialization. Norfolk farmers had pioneered the cultivation of clover in England, but it was only after 1740 that the principal benefits of the new crop were felt and yields began to rise rapidly. The pressure on agricultural resources during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793–1815) led to additional land being brought (temporarily) into cultivation but also to higher prices as farm produce occasionally failed to keep pace with demand, and higher rents.

The third phase, beginning in about 1830, and sometimes called the second agricultural revolution, saw for the first time farmers using substantial inputs purchased off their farms, in the form of new fertilizers for their land and artificial feedstuffs for their animals. Together with the introduction of improved methods of drainage, of particular importance for the heavier claylands, the results were seen in the era of high farming—a phrase used of more or less any progressive practices—between the 1840s and 1870s, which soon gave way to a severe and prolonged agricultural depression.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the agricultural revolution was the absence of real technological advances. Although steam-powered machines were introduced for various processes in the agricultural cycle, the availability of labour, especially in the corn-growing areas of southern and eastern England, seems to have slowed down the shift from labour to machinery, and it was not until the flight from the land during the late 19th-cent. depression that farmers began actively to introduce machinery.

In Scotland the agricultural revolution took a rather different form. Although, as in England, there has been a tendency to view it as a long-term change, it is now thought that, at least in the Lowlands, this underplays the transformation which occurred in the second half of the 18th cent. A rapid move towards single tenancies and production for the market was partly stimulated by the pace of population growth, and particularly of urbanization (notably Glasgow and Edinburgh) in the second half of the 18th cent., although Scottish industrialization prior to 1815 was partly at least a rural phenomenon, often via planned new settlements.

The result, in the second half of the 18th cent., was seen in the adoption of new technologies and crops, a shift to long leases with improving clauses written in, and higher productivity. Many of the existing farmers successfully adapted to the new demands upon them, so that there was no Lowland equivalent of the Highland clearances. In the long run the new agriculture enabled more food to be produced at lower cost and labour productivity rose as a part of this process. Overall the result was a radical departure from the patterns of the past in the last quarter of the 18th cent., not simply measured in terms of physical enclosure, but also in the more effective use of land involving liming, sown grasses, and the organization of labour. It was a structural change, and not simply a perpetuation and intensification of existing trends, since it produced a dramatic increase in crop yields, allowing Scottish cultivators to catch up on English levels of output in the space of a few decades, and resulted in a visible alteration of the rural social system in an equally short time.

John Beckett

Bibliography

Beckett, J. V. , The Agricultural Revolution (Oxford, 1990);
Kerridge, E. , The Agricultural Revolution (1967);
Mingay, G. E. , The Agricultural Revolution: Changes in Agriculture 1650–1880 (1977).