CROPS AND THEIR COST pdf

CROPS AND THEIR COST ARTHUR YOUNG.—CROPS AND THEIR COST.—THE LABOURERS' WAGES AND DIET.—THE PROSPERITY OF FARMERS.—THE COUNTRY SQUIRE.—ELKINGTON.—BAKEWELL.—THE ROADS.—COKE OF HOLKHAM. The history of English agriculture in the latter half of the eighteenth century has been so well described by Arthur Young that any account of it at that time must largely be an epitome of his writings. The greatest of English writers on agriculture was born in 1741, and began farming early; but, as he confesses himself, was a complete failure. When he was twenty-six he took a farm of 300 acres at Samford Hall in Essex, and after five years of it paid a farmer £100 to take it off his hands, who thereupon made a fortune out of it. He had already begun writing on agriculture, and it must be confessed that he began to advise people concerning the art of agriculture on a very limited experience. It paid him, however, much better than farming, for between 1766 and 1775 he realized £3,000 on his works, among which were The Farmer's Letters, The Southern,Northern, and Eastern Tours. These are his qualifications for writing on agriculture, from his own pen: 'I have been a farmer these many years' (he was not yet thirty), 'and that not in a single field or two but upon a tract of near 300 acres most part of the time. I have cultivated on various soils most of the vegetables common in England and many never introduced into field husbandry. I have always kept a minute register of my business in every detail of culture, expenses, and produce, and an accurate comparison of the old and new husbandry.' [440] It is said that though he really understood the theory and practice of farming he failed utterly in small economies. He was also far too vivacious and fond of society for the monotonous work of the plain farmer. At the same time his failures gave his observant mind a clear insight into the principles of agriculture. He was indefatigable in inquiries, researches, and experiments; and the best proof of the value of his works is that they were translated into Russian, German, and French. He tells us in the preface to Rural Economy that his constant employment for the previous seven years, 'when out of my fields, has been registering experiments.' His pet aversions were absentee landlords, obsolete methods of cultivation, wastes and commons, and small holdings (though towards the end of his life he changed his opinion as to the last); and the following, according to him, were the especially needed improvements of the time:— The knowledge of good rotations of crops so as to do away with fallows, which was to be effected by the general use of turnips, beans, peas, tares, clover, &c., as preparation for white corn; covered drains; marling, chalking, and claying; irrigation of meadows; cultivation of carrots, cabbages, potatoes, sainfoin, and lucerne; ploughing, &c., with as few cattle as possible; the use of harness for oxen; cultivation of madden liquorice, hemp, and flax where suitable. [441] Above all, the cultivation of waste lands, which he was to live to see so largely effected. There was little knowledge of the various sorts of grasses at this time, and to Young is due the credit of introducing the cocksfoot, and crested dog's tail. In 1790 he contemplated retiring to France or America, so heavy was taxation in England. 'Men of large fortune and the poor', he said, in words which many to-day will heartily endorse, 'have reason to think the government of this country the first in the world; the middle classes bear the brunt.' Perhaps to-day 'men of large fortune' have altered their opinion and only 'the poor' are satisfied. However, he only visited France, and gave us his vivid picture of that country before the great revolution. In 1793 the Board of Agriculture was formed, and Young was made secretary with a salary of £400 a year. About 1810 he wrote that the preceding half-century had been by far the most interesting in the progress of agriculture, and ascribes the increase of interest in it to the publication of his Tours. George III told him he always took with him the Farmer's Letters. The improvement, Young said, had been largely due to individual effort, for commerce had been predominant in Parliament and agriculture had begun to be neglected; a statement which, seeing that Parliament was then almost entirely composed of landowners, must be accepted with some reserve. Young died in 1820, having been totally blind for some time, a misfortune which did not prevent him working hard. In his well-known Tours he often had much difficulty in obtaining information, and confesses that he was forced to make more than one farmer drunk before he got anything out of him. The exodus from the country to the towns then, as so often in history, was noted by thinking people, but Young says it was merely a natural consequence of the demand for profitable employment and was not to be regretted; but he wrote in a time when the country population was still numerous, and there was little danger of England becoming, what she is to-day, a country without a solid foundation, with no reservoir of good country blood to supply the waste of the towns. When Young began to write, the example of Townshend and his contemporaries was being followed on all sides, and this good movement was stimulated by Young's writings. Farming was the reigning taste of the day. There was scarce a nobleman without his farm, most of the country gentlemen were farmers, and attended closely to their business instead of leaving it to stewards, 'who governed in matters of wheat and barley as absolutely as in covenants of leases,' and the squire delighted in setting the country a staring at the novelties he introduced. Even the stable and the kennel were ousted by farming from rural talk, [442] and citizens who breathed the smoke of London five days a week were farmers the other two, and many young fellows of small fortune who had been brought up in the country took farms, and the fashion was followed by doctors, lawyers, clergymen, soldiers, sailors, and merchants. The American and French War of 1775-83 and the great conflict with France from 1793 to 1815 were, however, to divert many of the upper classes from agriculture, for they very properly thought their duty was then to fight for their country; so that we again have numerous complaints of agents and stewards managing estates who knew nothing whatever about their business. It was not to be wondered at that all this activity brought about considerable progress. 'There have been,' said Young about 1770, 'more experiments, more discoveries, and more general good sense displayed within these ten years than in a hundred preceding ones,' a statement which perhaps did not attach sufficient importance to the work of Townshend and his contemporaries, and to the 'new husbandry' of Tull, which Young did not appreciate at its full value. [443] The place subsequently taken by the Board of Agriculture, and in our time by the Royal Agricultural Society, was then occupied by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, which offered premiums for such objects as the cultivation of carrots in the field for stock, then little practised; for gathering the different sorts of grass seeds and keeping them clean and free from all mixture with other grasses, a very rare thing at that time; for experiments in the comparative merits of the old and new husbandry; for the growth of madder; £20 for a turnip-slicing machine, then apparently unknown, and for experiments whether rolling or harrowing grass land was better, 'at present one of the most disputed points of husbandry.' In spite of this progress, many crops introduced years before were unknown to many farmers. Sainfoin, cabbages, potatoes, carrots, were not common crops in every part of England, though every one of them was well known in some part or other; not more than half, or at most two-thirds, of the nation cultivated clover. Many, however, of the nobility and gentry in the north had grown cabbages with amazing success, lately, 30 guineas an acre being sometimes the value of the crop. Half the cultivated lands, in spite of the progress of enclosure for centuries, were still farmed on the old common-field system. When anything out of the common was to be done on common farms, all common work came to a standstill. 'To carry out corn stops the ploughs, perhaps at a critical season; the fallows are frequently seen overrun with weeds because it is seed time; in a word, some business is ever neglected.' [444] As for the outcry against enclosing commons and wastes, people forgot that the farmers as well as the poor had a right of common and took special care by their large number of stock to starve every animal the poor put on the common. [445] About the same time that Young wrote these words there appeared a pamphlet written by 'A Country Gentleman' on the advantages and disadvantages of enclosing waste lands and common fields, which puts the arguments against enclosure very forcibly. [446] The writer's opinion was that it was clearly to the landowner's gain to promote enclosures, but that the impropriator of tithes reaped most benefit and the small freeholder least, because his expenses increased inversely to the smallness of his allotment. As to diminution of employment, he reckoned that enclosed arable employed about ten families per 1,000 acres, open field arable twenty families, a statement opposed to the opinion of nearly all the agricultural writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is surely an incontestable fact that enclosed land meant much better tillage, and better tillage meant more labour, the excessive amount of fallow necessary under the common-field system, from the inability to grow roots except by special arrangement, is alone enough to prove this. The same writer admitted that common pastures, wastes, &c., employed only one family per 2,000 acres, but enclosed pasture five families per 1,000 acres, and enclosed wastes sixteen families. A 'Country Farmer', who wrote in 1786, states that many of the small farmers displaced by enclosures sold their few possessions and emigrated to America. [447] The growing manufacturing towns also absorbed a considerable number. That there was a considerable amount of hardship inflicted on small holders and commoners is certain, but industrial progress is frequently attended by the dislocation of industry and consequent distress; the introduction of machinery, for instance, often causing great suffering to hand-workers, but eventually benefiting the whole community. How many men has the self-binding reaping machine thrown for a time out of work? So enclosure caused distress to many individuals, but was for the good of the whole nation. The history of enclosure is really the history of progress in farming; the conversion of land badly tilled in the old common fields, and of waste land little more valuable than the prairies; into well-managed fruitful farms. That much of the common-field land when enclosed was laid down to grass is certainly true, and certainly inevitable if it paid best under grass. [448] No one can expect the holders of land naturally best suited for grass to keep it under tillage for philanthropic purposes. A vast number of the commoners too were idle thriftless beings, whose rights on a few acres enabled them to live a life of pilfering and poaching; and it was a very good thing when such people were induced to lead a more regular and respectable existence. The great blot on the process was that it made the English labourer a landless man. Compensation was given him at the time of enclosure in the shape of allotments or sums of money, but the former he was generally compelled to give up owing to the expense he had been put to at allotment, and the latter he often spent in the public-house. At this date the proprietors of large estates who wished to enclose by Act of Parliament, generally settled all the particulars among themselves before calling any meeting of the rest of the proprietors. The small proprietor had very little say either in regulating the clauses of the Act, or in the choice of commissioners. Any owner of one-fifth of the land, however, could negative the measure and often used his right to impose unreasonable clauses. It is well known that the legal expenses and fencing were very costly. The enclosure commissioners too often divided the land in an arbitrary and ignorant manner, and there was no appeal from them except by filing a bill in Chancery. Accounts were hardly ever shown by the commissioners, and if a proprietor refused to pay the sums levied they were empowered to distrain immediately. All these evils attending enclosure made many who were eager to benefit by it very chary in commencing it. [449] Then, as now, one of the commonest errors of farmers was that of taking too much land for their capital; Young considered £6 an acre necessary on an average, equal to more than £12 to-day; a sum which few farmers at any time have in hand when they take a farm. As for gentlemen farmers, who were then rushing into the business, they were warned that they had no chance of success if they kept any company or amused themselves with anything but their own business, unless perhaps they had a good bailiff. Lime, one of the most ancient of manures, was then the most commonly used in England, 80 to 100 loads an acre being a common dressing, but many farmers were very ignorant of its proper use. Marl, which to-day is seldom used, was considered to last for twenty years, though for the first year no benefit was observable, and very little the second and the third, its value then becoming very apparent. In the last five years, however, its value was nearly worn out. But it was much to be questioned whether marl in its best state anywhere yields an increase of produce equal to that which a good manuring of dung will give. [450] Marl was applied in huge quantities on arable and grass, and often made the latter look like arable land so thickly was it spread. At this date (1770) the average crops on poor, and on good land were [451] : On land worth 5s. an acre: Wheat 12 bushels per acre. Rye 16 " " Barley 16 " " Oats 20 " " Turnips, to the value of £1. Clover " " On land worth 20s. an acre: Wheat 28 bushels per acre. Barley 40 " " Oats 48 " " Beans 40 " " Turnips, to the value of £3. Clover " " The cost of cultivating the latter, which may be given in full, as it affords an excellent example of the price of growing various crops, and the methods of their cultivation at this period, was as follows: First year, turnips: £ s. d. [...]... events, was then on the whole badly managed and unprofitable The average cow ate 21/2 acres of grass, and the rent of this with labour and other expenses made the cost £5 a year per cow, and its average produce was not worth more than £5 6s 3d.[454] This scanty profit was due to the fact that few farmers used roots, cabbages, &c., for their cows, and to their wrong management of pigs, kept on the surplus... having sufficient capital they were able both to buy and sell to the best advantage and not sacrifice their produce at a low price to meet the rent, as the small farmer so often did and does They could pay better wages and so get better men, kept more stock and better, and more efficient implements They also had a great advantage in being able by their good teams to haul home plenty of purchased manure,... versus oxen for working purposes was still raging, and Young favoured the use of oxen; for the food of horses cost more, so did their harness and their shoeing, they are much more liable to disease, and oxen when done with could be sold for beef One stout lad, moreover, could attend to 8 or 10 oxen, for all he had to do was to put their fodder in the racks and clean the shed; no rubbing, no currying or... and they all had to be opened again Further, said the advocates of the old husbandry, it was a question whether all the horse-hoeings, hand-hoeings, and weedings of the new husbandry, though undoubtedly beneficial, really paid It was very hard to get enough labourers for these operations With more reason they objected to the principles of discarding manure and sowing a large number of white straw crops. .. old age Cullum[463] a few years later, remarks on the poor demanding assistance without the scruple and delicacy they used to have, and says 'the present age seems to aim at abolishing all subordination and dependence and reducing all ranks as near a level as possible.'! Idleness, drunkenness, and what was then often looked on with disgust and contempt, excessive tea-drinking, were rife Tea then was... Hallam described the reign of George II as 'the most prosperous period that England has ever experienced'[476]; and it was Young's opinion about 1770 that England was in a most rich and flourishing situation, 'her agriculture is upon the whole good and spirited and every day improving, her industrious poor are well fed, clothed, and lodged at reasonable rates, the prices of all necessaries being moderate,... his fields after they had done a hard day's work and rode them all night to drive the game into their nets, blundering over the hedges, sometimes staking the horses, riding over standing corn, or anything that was cover for partridges, and when they had sold their ill-gotten game spent the money openly at the nearest alehouse Then they would go back and work for the farmers they had robbed, drunk,... the north of England was wretched In Northumberland the profit was reckoned at 1s a head, partly derived from cheese made from ewes' milk The fleeces averaged 2 lb., and the wool was so bad as not to be worth more than 3d or 4d per lb.[455] Pigs could be made to pay well, as the following account testifies: Food and produce of a sow in one year (1763), which produced seven pigs in April and eleven in... disputes as to the old and new methods of husbandry, the efficacy of the new being far from decided The cause of the slow adoption of drill husbandry was the inferiority of the drills hitherto invented They were complex in construction, expensive, and hard to procure It seemed impossible to make a drill or drill plough as it was called, for such it then was—a combination of drill, plough, and harrow—capable... the Midlands, who had brought up a family of five or six sons and daughters on a wage of 5s to 7s a week, and after they were out in the world saved enough to support him in his old age The majority, however, long before the crushing times of the French War, seem to have been thoroughly demoralized by indiscriminate parish relief, and habitually looked to the parish to maintain them in sickness and old . CROPS AND THEIR COST ARTHUR YOUNG. CROPS AND THEIR COST. —THE LABOURERS' WAGES AND DIET.—THE PROSPERITY OF FARMERS.—THE COUNTRY SQUIRE.—ELKINGTON.—BAKEWELL.—THE. on arable and grass, and often made the latter look like arable land so thickly was it spread. At this date (1770) the average crops on poor, and on good land were [451] : On land worth 5s into field husbandry. I have always kept a minute register of my business in every detail of culture, expenses, and produce, and an accurate comparison of the old and new husbandry.' [440]