British Agriculture

England was one of the first nations in the modern period to increase the efficiency of its agricultural production, making it possible to produce the same or more while using fewer workers. By the end of the seventeenth century, England was already in advance of most of continental Europe in agricultural productivity, with only about 60percent of its workers involved primarily in food production. Although the actual number of workers in agriculture continued to grow until the middle of the nineteenth century, the proportion declined steadily to about 36 percent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to about22 percent in the mid-nineteenth century (when the absolute number was at its maximum), and to less than 10 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The means by which England increased its agricultural productivity owed much to trial-and-error experimentation with new crops and new crop rotations.Turnips, clover, and other fodder crops(plants used to feed livestock) were introduced from the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, and became widely diffused in the seventeenth.Probably the most important agricultural innovation before scientific agriculture was introduced in the nineteenth century was the development of so-called convertible husbandry, involving the alternation of field crops with temporary pastures in place of permanent cultivated fields and pastures.This had the double advantage of restoring the fertility of the soil through improved rotation, including leguminous crops, and of maintaining a larger number of livestock, thus producing more manure for fertilizer as well as more meat, dairy produce, and wool.Many landowners and farmers also experimented with selective breeding of livestock.

An important condition for both the improved rotations and selective breeding was the enclosure (the conversion of common land into private plots) and consolidation of the fields. Under the traditional open field system it was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain agreement among the many participants on the introduction of new crops or rotation; and with livestock grazing in common herds it was equally difficult to manage selective breeding.The most famous enclosures were those carried out by acts of Parliament (the British governing body) between 1760 and 1815.Enclosure by private agreement, however, had been going on almost continually from the late Middle Ages; it was especially active in the late seventeenth and the first six decades of the eighteenth centuries. By that time more than half of England’s arable land (land that can be farmed productively) had been enclosed.

The new agricultural landscape that emerged to replace villages surrounded by their open fields consisted of fields that were compact,consolidated, and closed-in by walls, fences, or hedges.Along with the processes of enclosure and technological improvement, a gradual tendency toward larger farms emerged, further boosting productivity.By 1851 about one-third of the cultivated acreage was in farms larger than 300 acres; farms smaller than 100 acres accounted for only 22 percent of the land.Even so, the occupants of the small farms outnumbered those of the others almost two to one.The reason for this is that the small farmers were owner-occupiers who farmed the land with the help of family labor; the larger farmers rented pieces of their property to others and hired landless agricultural workers. It used to be thought that the enclosures led to a loss of population in the countryside, but in fact the new techniques of cultivation associated with them actually increased the demand for labor. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century, with the introduction of such farm machinery as threshers, harvesters, and steam plows, did the absolute size of the agricultural labor force begin to decrease.

In the meantime, the increasing productivity of English agriculture enabled it to feed a burgeoning population at steadily rising standards of nutrition.For about a century, from 1660 to 1760,English farmers produced a surplus for export;after that period, the rate of population growth overtook the rate of increase of productivity.The relatively prosperous rural population provided a ready market for manufacturing goods, ranging from agricultural implements to such consumer products as clothing, pewter-ware, and porcelain.

1.England was one of the first nations in the modern period to increase the efficiency of its agricultural production, making it possible to produce the same or more while using fewer workers. By the end of the seventeenth century, England was already in advance of most of continental Europe in agricultural productivity, with only about 60percent of its workers involved primarily in food production. Although the actual number of workers in agriculture continued to grow until the middle of the nineteenth century, the proportion declined steadily to about 36 percent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to about22 percent in the mid-nineteenth century (when the absolute number was at its maximum), and to less than 10 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century.