What are the relationships between agricultural changes and the industrial revolution in England?

• agriculture became more efficient, fewer workers were needed in agriculture
• the jobs available for agricultural laborers became more short-term
  
• when rich landowners made profits they sometimes invested in industry
• more efficient agriculture provided food for a larger urban population
• better transportation, even export, allowed farmers to make more profit
• industrial revolution brought mass production of equipment farmers used
• the economics are tricky because food is very price-inelastic
  

Improvements in agriculture helped start the industrial revolution and were crucial to its success
notice also what life was like for farm laborers, to provide a comparison with the lives of factory workers

Older (Medieval) system of agriculture in England: Villages farmed communally—people living in a village worked together to farm a large area of land

• Divided land into a few large fields which were planted in a 3 field crop rotation (wheat or rye, oats or beans, fallow)
• another part of the land of the village was common land, which provided a place to graze animals and gather wild plants and some firewood
  
• see notes on medieval agriculture

Leading up to the industrial revolution, the key change was Enclosure, a change in how the use of agricultural land was organized

• key to agriculture becoming more efficient
  
• land ownership:
• the owners of the land were rich upper class families
• they leased the land to villages whose residents cooperated to farm communally but different families has the right to the produce of different amounts of land
  
• during enclosure the landowners wrote new leases to individual families--often 19 year leases
  
• every family in that village had the right to get a lease for an amount of land equivalent to the rights they had before
• the replacement of communal farms with family farms was well underway before the industrial revolution--started on the basis of agreement of villagers but was increasingly forced after 1760
• communally farmed land and common land were divided up into family farms, each family getting an equivalent share to what they had before
• people who got very small farms couldn't survive on their own without the right to use the common (because it has been divided up too) and had to sell out, so farms got larger (several hundred acres)
• family farms (on leased land) worked by the family and some hired agricultural laborers (at first fairly often hired on an annual basis)
  
• this was key because it gave opportunities to those farmers who were interested in improving--they could invest in improving their land or new crops
  
• End result of this process of enclosure & farms getting larger was a pattern of large family farms on land leased from an upper class landowner:
  • Farms of 200-500 acres
    
  • One family held the lease and makes decisions
  • That family could invest in improvements and get profits
  
  

• 15-20% of the land was owned by the farmers themselves, 75% by large landlords, usually the old aristocracy whose families had owned the land for many generations
• farmers did often have 19 year leases--farm size refers to the size of the farm a family leased and managed, not the land owned by a landlord
• the small farmers who sold their land rights mostly become agricultural laborers but some moved to cities
  
• the overall labor surplus kept wages down
  
• in a few areas people were moved off the land to increase pastureland for sheep
• it is somewhat oversimplified to say that poor people moved from rural areas to the cities and provided the labor force for the industrial revolution
• but agriculture certainly made a difference because it allowed population increases and fed an increasing population of city-dwellers
  

• even before the industrial revolution there were leaseholders who controlled land and laborers who had no land rights and worked for money (or food)
• enclosure benefits the remaining leaseholders, but more people become laborers
  
• before the industrial revolution, farm workers had been hired annually and fed by the farmer, as the industrial revolution developed the system changed, farm laborers were hired when needed and paid weekly wages
• why?  disappearance of feudalism, more emphasis on profit
• the system of relief for the poor--poor laws--was based on the idea you could only get help in the place where you were born
• population began to grow more rapidly, more food
  
• the poor had large families because more children meant more wages and with the early poor law reform called the Speenhamland System, actual cash benefits
  
• Hobsbawm writes about the Speenhamland system, which made the situation worse by encouraging people to have more children and providing benefits only if they stayed in the parish where they were born (discouraging them from moving to find work)
  

a turnip slicer because horses can't manage whole turnips

• the amount of land in cultivation increased because of the enclosure of common land
  
• four field crop rotation--wheat, turnips, barley or oats, clover or alfalfa
• consider a 500 acre farm
• after enclosure the common land becomes cropland instead of permanent pasture so cultivated land increased from 360 acres to 480 acres
• the number of animals kept doubled, to 25 horses, 80 cattle and 350 sheep, who eat clover or alfalfa 9 months of the year and turnips in the winter
  
• these provided enough manure to fully fertilize the land, increasing grain yields by at least 10%
• labor needed increased from 15 to 21 year-round laborers, increasing the incentive to mechanize, but the new farm did not need any more labor during harvest than the old
  
• the earnings of the farm increased because of higher grain yields and because there were more animals, so the total revenue increase was 24%
  
• turnips and hay crops make it possible to keep more livestock over the winter and therefore to have more manure for fertilizer
• new willingness to try new things in agriculture--
  
• new scientific approaches to farming. willingness to experiment
  
• one of the pioneer scientific investigators of agriculture was an Englishman named Jethro Tull, who introduced an improved seed drill in 1701 and did systematic experiments to see what worked
  
• these technologies at first spread very slowly--they were widespread by 1800
  
• importing of fertilizer (guano from South America)
• 
  
• breeding of improved livestock (eg. Herefords)
  
• fencing and drainage, including laying clay pipes under the fields after 1843
• mass production reduced the cost of tile pipes
• 
  
• average agricultural surplus per worker doubled from about 25% to about 50%

Rapid industrialization meant more demand for food and therefore required further innovation in agriculture--improved science and technology for agriculture were as much a result of the industrial revolution as a cause.  Capitalism was coming to agriculture