|
Agricultural developments
From farm to factory |
||
|
Tis bad enough in man or woman who steals the goose from of the common, but surely he's without excuse that steals the woman from the goose' A popular rhyme from the early 1800s against the enclosure of farm land |
|
You can see that the iron plough was so much more efficient than the wooden that would get clogged up and be much harder work for the horse or oxen. |
|
As the population of the country increased so the need for better ways of growing the extra food needed. Farms needed to use science in order to make them as efficient as they could be. Lots of new inventions and developments helped in this. One of the most famous was Jethro Tulls seed drill.
Jethro Tull did come up with other inventions but none were as useful as the seed drill. Tull saw that the old way of broadcasting seeds in fields was very inefficient. Many of the seeds would land on stony ground or on unsuitable land. Many others of the seed would be eaten by birds and just a small percentage would be left to grow. The seed drill was able to place seeds evenly and symmetrically in the field. Hoeing and caring for the plants could then be done by machine and the loss of valuable seed was cut down. Fertilising ground and using crops such as peas and clover to help enrich land was used. The need to leave one field fallow was now unnecessary. People like 'Turnip' Townshend developed ways of breading new breeds of animals to increase production. So that the average sheep sold at market in 1710 was 50lbs. By 1795 it was 80lbs.
This picture from 1808 may be exaggerating the effects of selective breeding! Many poor farmers did not do very well out of the move to enclose land. While it made sense to make land move productive, many small landowners did not have the money to enclose their land. Many were faced with having to give it up and leave farming altogether. |
|
KEY WORDS * Agriculture The technical name for the science of farming. As time went on farming became a very precise science and needed greater and greater care to keep production up.
* Enclosure The old way of farming was outdated and very inefficient. Farms were split up into strips and very little advantage could be taken of new inventions such as the seed drill and the iron plough or horse-drawn hoe. Farmers could apply to parliament to get the land divided between the legal owners and then had to be divided by walls or fences. It made farming more efficient, but many poor farmers had to leave the land and work in the new factories. * Industrialisation The change that a country goes through when farming becomes less important in making the countries wealth than factories (industry). * Crop rotation To try and make farms efficient and less likely to be infected by disease farms had to grow food crops in a special order in each field. This meant that any field would not have the same crop in it for four years. * Fallow Before the industrial revolution little was know about increasing productivity of farm land. It was then considered good practice to make sure every field had a one year rest in four. This meant a quarter of your land was growing nothing. * Commissioner If a village wanted to have its land enclosed it had to get permission from parliament. A commissioner would be sent to find out who had a legal claim on the land and how to split it up. It usually was found to be very unfair on small landowners or people who had no papers to prove ownership. * Broadcasting The old way of sowing seed. The farmer would carry a bag full of seed and throw it onto the ploughed field. It was very wasteful.
|
