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Since the hunter gatherers, remember them, stopped hunting and gathering and settled down in one place, people had been growing and making their own food and looking after cattle, pigs and chickens. This is called agriculture or, as we tend to call it today, farming. The word agriculture comes from the Latin language spoken by the Romans. Ager meant field and cultura meant growing or cultivating.
Over the centuries small changes had been made to the way things were done and it would be impossible to put a fixed date on these. However, as I have said it would be impossible, we will do it and from this date, 1750, talk about something in England known as the Agrarian, or Agricultural, Revolution but please remember it didn't just happen at one time, it was a gradual thing that certainly did speed up about this time.
There were many reasons why these changes took place, some scientific, some because of inventions and discovery. We will look at some of them here. Firstly was the way seeds were planted. In 1701 a guy called Jethro Tull invented an improved seed drill. The original idea came from China and then on through Italy, but Tull's was a new invention of a old idea. Until then seeds had been thrown on to the land by hand and then a tool called a harrow was used to cover the seeds; some of them. There was no control of the amount of space between seeds. Tull's device was a mechanical seeder which sowed seeds at an even space and at the correct depth.
Farmers also became more aware of the need for something we call crop rotation. Seeds don't just grow. They take a lot of goodness out of the ground and so, if you grow the same seeds in the same field each year, the seeds will produce less each year as the ground becomes less fertile. Crop rotation means you grow different crops in the same field over a period of four years. People had been doing this in some form for centuries but it became very popular now. The brother-in-law of Robert Walpole, our first Prime Minister, was one of the people who made this idea popular.
His name was Charles Townshend. It is unlikely he invented the idea of the so-called Norfolk Crop Rotation System but he certainly made it popular. He was a top politician at one time but he had an argument with his brother and went back to his estate in Norfolk. Then he began experimenting with things he had learned. The end result was that he divided his land into four fields and grew wheat in one, barley in another, turnips in the third and clover in the fourth. Next year, everything moved round one field. What Townshend didn't know was that clover puts nitrogen back into the soil and when animals were put into the clover and turnip fields to graze, their poo also fertilized the land. Townshend became known as “turnip Townshend” for his efforts.
Another thing that allowed this agrarian revolution to happen was the enclosure of common land. This again had been going on for hundreds of years but it now became more common (haha). It meant that fields needed less people to work on them and also that peasants and villagers lost some of their grazing and growing land. Luckily for them all this happened about the time of the Industrial Revolution, more later, so they went off to the towns and cities to work in the new factories. The effect of enclosures can still be seen on our landscape today.
More farmers and landowners now sold their produce at markets held all over the country and a change in the way goods were to be transported, (once again, more soon), meant people could sell things over a far wider area.
More land was also being reclaimed to be used for farming. The English learnt much about this from the Dutch who lived in a country close to sea level and so had systems to make use of marsh land and even stop the sea from covering some land. This land would also be very fertile.
Farmers made better choices of what seeds to sow. Barley, which had a good yield, replaced rye which didn't. The yield is the number of plants you get from one seed. More land was set over to growing crops, this was called arable land, than was used for pastures because the cattle, sheep and pigs could graze on the crops like turnip and clover. Farmers also started something called selective breeding where they would mate animals with strong characteristics to ensure strong offspring.
All of these things, and others, contributed to a change in farming methods in England, a change that lasted for a long time until the introduction of chemical fertilizers and mass machinery. I think it can also be said that by needing less people, by making farming more efficient, this played a major part in the industrial revolution which really started the modern world as we now know it.
Forward to 1752AD
