al Revolution describes a period of agricultural development in Britain between the 15th century and the end of the 19th century, which saw an epoch-making increase in agricultural productivity and net output that broke the historical food scarcity cycles. Every continent in the world has experienced a period of famine throughout history. These famines effectively limited the population to what a local territories could sustain over long periods of time including short term shortages. Famines occur when food is unavailable for a period of time usually exceeding a year and the resources: weather, agricultural workers, money, transportation, etc. are not available to get or grow more. Since famines or food shortages are usually "local" affairs the ability to buy and transport food over a much longer distances helped minimize the impacts of local crop shortages. The British Agricultural Revolution occurred over a period of several centuries (more of an evolution than a revolution) and it was preceded or closely duplicated by many countries in Europe and their colonies. One of the keys to the British Agricultural Revolution was the development of ways of keeping and improving the arable land in Great Britain to counteract the loss of the soil's plant nutrients in cropping a given area. Higher yielding land was added to higher yielding crops with more yield/acre. Farm workers using more productive tools and machinery produced more crops with fewer workers. The Agricultural Revolution picked up speed as the Industrial Revolution and the advances in chemistry produced the scientific knowledge, wealth and technology for a more systematic development of commercial fertilizers and new and more productive agricultural machinery. New crops like potatoes (introduced about 1600), corn, etc. were introduced from the Americas improving the yield/acre of arable land.The British agricultural revolution, the British Industrial Revolution and Scientific Revolution developed in lock-step. Without increasing amounts of food to feed the increasing city populations the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions could not have proceeded. Without the capital, tools, metals, increased agricultural markets, scientific and technical knowledge generated by the Industrial and Scientific Revolution the Agricultural Revolution would not have been possible. Each so called "Revolution" supported and advanced the other revolutions?they were (and still are) intricately linked together.

Improved transportation systems like sailing ships, paddle steamers (after 1830), steam ships (after 1860), refrigerator ships (after 1890), toll roads (after 1700), canals (after 1760), railroads (after 1830) allowed food and animal crops to be gathered over ever increasing distances. New food preservation techniques like canning (after 1800), refrigeration (after 1880) as well as traditional food storage techniques like root cellars, granaries, etc. were improved. These allowed more food to be stored over longer periods of time and minimized the impact of local shortages. Ever increasing literacy (spread by the Protestant Reformation among others) and cheap "How-To" books made available by Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press made information on successful new agricultural techniques spread faster and over much wider territories. New technologies like the telegraph (after 1830) and the telephone (after 1880) improved the flow of information needed to ship or grow new crops. New crop rotation systems involving turnips and clover (plus others) made it less necessary to have so much land lie fallow. New crops had more yield per acre and new improved livestock that could be fed though the winters gave larger yields of meat. Larger drives of livestock from Ireland, Wales and Scotland increased the available meat supply available to be purchased in the ever increasing cities. New irrigation systems called water meadows allowed longer growing seasons on pasture land and increased yield from hay fields allowing more animals to be raised. Improved use and new fertilizers in addition to "manure" helped maintain and improve the arable land or reclaim formerly "waste" land. These improvements and new crops in turn supported unprecedented population growth, freeing up a significant percentage of the workforce, and thereby helped drive the Industrial Revolution.The Bank of England (after 1700) helped the farmers get and use the capital (raised from other investors) needed to buy farm improvements and herds of livestock. A good financial system was needed to put capital investments back into the farms and livestock operations. Since it was much more economical to use a few herders as reasonable to bring herds of livestock the long distances from Ireland, Wales and Scotland to England for fattening and/or slaughter accumulating the money to buy these herds was much facilitated by a workable banking system. The wealth (capital) earned by the workers in the Industrial Revolution in turn allowed these workers to buy and pay for more agricultural farm and livestock production. The Industrial Revolution also made many things much cheaper so the farmers could purchase more extensive wardrobes, metal tools, new machines, etc. with the same earnings. There are large variations in the location and time different agricultural innovations were introduced in the many different agricultural zones in Britain and the rest of the world. Advances in science, engineering and elementary botany encouraged the progression of the Agricultural Revolution in Britain and elsewhere. More professional farm management, more capital investment, better agricultural education, improved fertilizations, new improv
Farm life in the 15th to 18th century

The about 77,800,000 acres (about 31,480,000 hectares) of land in Britain pre-1922 varied considerably in arability. England had about 30% arable land with Wales, Scotland and Ireland favoring raising livestock and dairy farming with only about 3%, 7% and 15% arable land respectively. Nearly all of Britain is less than from the ocean and many communities have close ties to fishing and trade. Nearly all farmers kept livestock as well as growing crops on arable land for their own food and a small extra amount to trade with the towns people for goods they couldn't or didn't have time to make. The livestock were almost a necessity as they could eat pasture during the day and spread some of their manure over arable or fallow land during the night if a crop was not planted there yet. During the winter when they were fed and housed their manure built up around the stock pens and was usually hauled out in the spring and spread on the grain fields before they were plowed. To help keep the land productive manure or other plant matter had to be spread on the soil by the livestock or the farmer regularly to maintain the plant nutrient levels needed to grow wheat, oats, rye, barley, etc.. Barley was grown primarily to be fed to animals or brewed into beer. The water in this time period (before germs were known or water treatment plants) was so unsafe that beer was a very common beverage drank by nearly all?children included. Oats, rye and wheat were primarily used in cereals and breads. The productivity of the farms gradually increased as a larger fraction moving to the cities left fewer farmers to grow more and larger crops.Nearly all farm and village families kept gardens that grew a wide variety of vegetables that were used when they had ripened or grown large enough. Nearly all farmers kept pigs, which could often scrounge most of their own food or eat milk left over from making cheese, scraps or slop. Most kept chickens which could provide eggs and meat and which could often scrounge much of their food in the summer and only needed to be fed during the winter months. Cows were kept by most farmers for their hides, milk, meat and manure as well as being used as draft animals. Sheep were kept for their hides, milk, meat, manure as well as their wool. Wool was a ?money? crop that allowed the wool to be sold for extra money to buy the few things that weren?t produced on the farm. Some wool was often kept to be spun by women on a spinning wheel into thread and then put on a loom to be woven into cloth. Making cloth and clothing was so labor intensive (before the Industrial Revolution) that many farmers only had two to three different sets of clothing per lifetime. The most sheep were usually owned by the largest land owners. Initially horses were scarce, owned only by large land owners, as they required more winter feed and were only slightly more productive as farm animals than oxen which could live on poorer food and be eaten. A horse was seldom eaten by people in Britain.The main disadvantage of farm animals is that food had to be prov
Soil maintenance

To grow more food the land has to be maintained at its present nutrient level or better so it can grow larger and better crops. Each crop removes some essential nutrients (N:P:K+) from the soil. One of the keys to the Agricultural revolution was the use of manure and bacteria in symbiosis with legume roots which could be used to fix nitrogen (N) in the soil. Through crop rotation and use of organic fertilizers the soil can be maintained; but higher yielding crops require either a large amount of organic or commercial fertilizer. Continually growing the same crop on the same fields will deplete the soil in its needed plant nutrients and the crop yields will continually go down or cease?the crop removes the nutrients till they are too low to support good growth. One way around this problem is to move to new land and start over. Even before 1100 Britain was too well developed to find much more arable land with about one third of its about 39,000,000 acres already put to crop use (about the same as today) with about another third in pasture and the final third composed of waste, forest, villages etc. England?s slash and burn agricultural stage was largely behind it. A crop takes from its field 1.3-2.0% of its weight in nitrogen (N),0.13-0.3% in phosphorus (P) and 1.0-2.0% in potassium (K) and other needed trace minerals. The carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that constitute about 96% of the weight of a typical plant are turned into organic growth by CO₂ in the air and H₂O from the soil plus dissolved plant nutrients in the soil. Plants grow by undergoing photosynthesis using the sun?s energy, CO₂, H₂O and the major plant nutrients nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) plus other nutrients. Twenty bushels of wheat (60 lb/bu) taken from a one acre field takes about 20 pounds of N with it, 100 bu/acre will remove about 100 lbs. N/acre, etc.. In nature nearly all of these nutrients are normally in some sort of equilibrium with the plant nutrients returned to the soil when the plants or animals that eat the plants die. When you remove a crop this equilibrium state is disturbed. To restore the soil's fertility after it has been cropped for a while the missing nutrients have to be replaced either by judicious plant rotations or using organic or chemical fertilizers.

The British Agricultural Revolution would not have been possible unless they learned how to maintain and restore the fertility of the soil as needed plant nutrients were removed with the crops. When animals eat a plant (or other animal) about 80-90% of the plant's nutrients absorbed by the plant from the soil pass though the animal and are excreted as urine and manure. It was widely known for centuries that manure was a good organic fertilizer that could be used to restore or enhance the productivity of arable land. Manure and urine have many of the nutrients absorbed in growing the crops and when regularly applied to the soil restores the plant nutrients to allow the growing of the same or larger crops on the same land. One advantage of organic fertilizers (manures) is that they tend to decompose slowly releasing their plant nutrients giving a long term boost to the plant nutrients. In addition, they add organic matter to the soil that helps retain water in the soil and keeps the soil looser for easier plant growth. One of the major advantages of manure and other organic fertilizers is that in addition to the major macro nutrients common in commercial fertilizers, nitrogen (N):phosphorus (P): potassium (K), they also contain needed plant macro and micro-nutrients like sulfur (S), calcium (Ca) and other nutrients. Different types of organic fertilizers have different ratios of the macro-nutrients N:P:K plus other micro and macro nutrients. One major disadvantages of organic fertilizers is that they have low concentrations of plant nutrients so that the collection, treatment, transportation and distribution or organic fertilizers are all potentially expensive. If organic fertilizers have to be hauled too far or handled too much they are not economical to use. For example, if it is determined that 100 kg/acre of nitrogen fertilizer is needed to be added to maintain a wheat field, etc. this would involve distributing about 20 tonnes of cow manure on the one acre plot to get the required nitrogen fertilizer. Another major disadvantage of manure and other organic fertilizers is that they lose 30-40% of the nutrients that typically leach away before or after they are applied. Much of the nitrogen in manure is locked up in organic components (amino acids etc.) that slowly decay so even in the second year it is not unusual for 20-30% of the initial nitrogen in the organic fertilizers to be available. Manure and other organic fertilizers were about the only fertilizer that was available to be regularly added to the soil before techniques were developed in the mid 1850s for phosphorus and potassium fertilizers and the early 1900s to make commercial nitrogen fertilizers.If the plant nutrient levels are to be kept high enough to continue growing large crops on the same soil some type of fertilizer is nearly always needed. The manure is provided by the animals from the grain, hay and grass they eat and has to be distributed where it is needed to maintain the plant nutrient levels. Human manure (known as nightsoil)
Maximizing Crops

During the Middle Ages, the open field system had initially used a two field crop rotation system where one field was left fallow or turned into pasture for a time to try to recover some of its plant nutrients. Later they employed a three year, three field crop rotation routine, with a different crop in each of two fields, e.g. oats, rye, wheat and barley with the second field growing a legume like peas or beans with the third field fallow. Each field was rotated into a different crop nearly every year. Over the following two centuries, the regular planting of legumes like peas and beans in the fields which were previously fallow slowly restored the fertility of some croplands. The planting of legumes helped to increase plant growth in the empty field due to the bacteria on legume roots ability to fix nitrogen (N₂) from the air into the soil in a form that plants could use it. Other crops that were occasionally grown were flax and members of the mustard family.One way to get more land to grow food on is to cut down on the amount of land left fallow to try to recover some of its plant nutrients. Normally from 10-30% of the arable land in a three crop rotation system is fallow. The British Agricultural Revolution was aided by land maintenance advancements in Flanders, and the Netherlands. Due to the large and dense population of Flanders and Holland, farmers there were forced to take maximum advantage of every inch of usable land, the country had become a pioneer in canal building, soil restoration and maintenance, soil drainage and land reclamation technology. Dutch experts like Cornelius Vermuyden brought some of this technology to Britain. The farmers in Flanders (in parts of France and current day Belgium) discovered a still more effective four-field crop rotation system, using turnips and clover (a legume) as forage crops to replace the three year crop rotation fallow year. "Turnip" Townshend and others introduced to England the four-field crop rotation pioneered by farmers in the Flanders, Belgium region in the early 16th century.The four field rotation system allowed farmers to restore soil fertility and restore some of the plant nutrients removed with the crops. Turnips first show up in the probate records in England as early as 1638 but were not widely used till about 1750. Fallow land was about 20% of the arable area in England in 1700 before turnips and clover were extensively introduced, and steadily declined to reach only about 4 % in 1900. Ideally, wheat, barley, turnips and clover would be planted in that order in each field in successive years. The turnips helped keep the weeds down and were an excellent forage crop that ruminant animals could eat their tops and roots through a large part of the summer and winters. There was little need to let the soil lie fallow as Clover would re-add nitrates (Nitrogen-containing salts) back to the soil through the root nodules attached to them which harboured symbiotic bacteria. These bacteria take nitrogen from the atmosphere and in turn produce the nitrates needed by the plants. Some nitrates are left in the soil when the plant dies are is plowed under. The clover made e
Fences and Enclosures

To manage agricultural land and livestock productively they usually have to be separated. Domesticated livestock if let loose can and often do destroy or damage a crop or over graze a pasture. Historically, the control of animals has often meant the hiring of a pig, cow, sheep, horse herders to control the movements of the animals. To minimize cost, herds of a particular village were often combined to allow less herders. Often the animals were brought back to village at night for fertilizing, feeding, milking, shearing, slaughtering or shelter. Flocks of livestock were often put in small fenced fields at night to spread their manure there. The manure came from digested food eaten by the livestock in a large pasture or fallow area during the day. Fences consisting of wooden stakes, rocks, hedges and later metal fences of netting and barbed wire minimized the need for these herders. Fences nearly always marked the boundaries of different farm properties that were bought, sold or rented to different farmers. These separate fields in turn allowed farmers to use more labor or capital intensive techniques to grow more food. Since Yeomen and husbandmen did most of the farm work with their own family and a few hired workers, more productive farms allowed more "extras" to be bought by the families and workers. These in turn provided the incentives needed to grow more food.Fences are often needed to improve livestock herds. Selected animals are chosen and bred through several generations to develop a particular breed. These animals need to be raised separately from common flocks to control the selective breeding cycle. Often selected horse studs, bulls, rams, boars, roosters, etc. are bought and bred with the goal of improving the herds. Often "choice" animals are bred to other animals as a source of income.Prior to the 18th century, agriculture had been much the same across Europe since the Middle Ages. The open field system was essentially feudal, with many subsistence farmers-cropping strips of land in one of three or four large fields held in common and splitting up the products likewise. The work was typical preformed under the auspices of the Aristocracy or the Catholic Church who owned much of the land.Beginning as early as the 12th century, some of the common fields in England tilled under the traditional open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields. The Black Death in 1349 and on essentially broke up the feudal system in England. To get more yield from a farm required a more secure control of the land?improvements are seldom made to "community" or commonly owned property. Many farms were bought by Yeomen who enclosed their property and improved the use of their land. Other husbandmen rented property they "share cropped" with the owners of the land. The process of enclosing property accelerated in the 15th and 16th centuries. This led to some villagers losing their land and their grazing rights and left many unemployed. English Poor Laws were enacted to help get over these adjustments and many started migrating to the cities looking for work. Only a few found work in the (increasin
British agriculture 1800-1900

Britain in 1800 was well underway on its Industrial Revolution and being ahead of most of the rest of the world could make and sell some products cheaper than anyone else. Initially this advantage was in the textile industry but soon the British use of coal, iron smelters and steam power for trains, ships, factories, agriculture, etc. were rapidly increased and very competitive. New agricultural implements were invented at an increasing pace all through the 1800s allowing agricultural populations in Britain to actually decrease. Some of this new capital generated by the Industrial Revolution was plowed back into agriculture to make the crop yields larger. New fertilizers, besides the organic fertilizers in manure, were slowly found as massive sodium nitrate (NaNO₃) deposits found in the Atacama desert, Chile, were brought under British financiers like John Thomas North and imports were started. Chile was happy to allow the exports of these sodium nitrates by allowing the British to use their capital to develop the mining and imposing a hefty export tax to enrich their treasury. Massive deposits of sea bird guano, (11-16% N, 8-12% phosphate and 2-3% potash (KCl+)) were found and started to be imported after about 1830. Significant imports of potash (KCl+) obtained from the ashes of trees burned in opening new agricultural lands were imported. By-products of the British meat industry like bones from the knacker?s yards were ground up or crushed and sold as fertilizer. By about 1840 about 30,000 tons of bones were being processed (worth about £150,000). An unusual alternative to bones was found to be the millions of tons of fossils called coprolites found in South East England. When these were dissolved in sulfuric acid they yielded a high phosphate mixture (called ?super?) that plants could absorb readily and increased crop yields. Mining coprolite and processing it for fertilizer soon developed into a major industry?the first commercial fertilizer. Higher yield per acre crops were also planted as potatoes went from about 300,000 acres in 1800 to about 400,000 acres in 1850 with a further increase to about 500,000 in 1900. Labor productivity slowly increased at about 0.6% per year. With more capital invested, more organic and inorganic fertilizers and better crop yields increased the food grown at about 0.5%/year?not enough to keep up with population growth.The British population in 1800 was about 8.7 million increasing to 16.7 million in 1851 and 41.6 million by 1901. This corresponds to a rate of population increase from 1801 to 1851 of 1.84% per year and a rate of population increase of 3.00% per year from 1851-1901. Not only did the need for more food increase but the need for more shoes, clothes, carriages, horses, homes, furniture, etc. increases at the same or a greater rate as more products became available. Fortunately, the fast growing coal mining industry could provide plentiful coal for heating etc.. Unfortunately, burning all this coal gave London a severe smog problem during nearly all winter months. Canals and macadamed roads helped lower the cost of tra
Mechanization of Agriculture

Abraham Darby I (1678?1717) was the first, and most famous, of three generations with that name in an English Quaker family that developed a method of producing pig iron in a blast furnace fuelled by the much more available coke made from coal rather than charcoal produced from wood. Pig iron in turn was the precursor of cast iron and steel?a major ingredient of the Industrial Revolution. As iron and steel became ever more prevalent and cheaper they were used to make more cheaper metal tools and farm implements and ever more complicated metal farm implements. The production of "cheap" iron and steel was a key component of the mechanization of agriculture.The main effect of mechanization and the addition of new farming implements, has been the increased productivity of each farm worker who can do more, sometimes several times more, work per day than he could without a particular mechanization. In the 1600s each agricultural worker grew enough food to feed about 1.25 people. Today each agricultural worker grows and harvests enough food to feed about 30 people. The mechanization of agriculture has been going on for centuries as new tools and capabilities were gradually adapted by farmers. Mechanization really took off after 1750 when new metal technologies made cheap steel and cast iron available and the development of steam power during the Industrial Revolution added another source of power on the farms that gradually displaced almost all of the others. The speed of mechanization has often been controlled by the size of the farm?small farms were seldom profitable enough to afford much new equipment. Typically this problem was "solved" by the farms consolidating into larger farms and/or sharing equipment?this process is still continuing today. Nearly always each new invention or mechanical device makes farm work less strenuous and faster.The tools used by a farmer in the 1500 to 1700s could almost be carried in a small cart or wagon: shovels, axes, hoes, mattocks, rakes, pitchforks, scythes, cradles, flails, wooden plows, oxbows, chains, knives, scissors, saws, hammers, carts later horseshoes, horse collars and harnesses were added as the farmers switched form ox power to horse power. Initially many of these tools were made mostly of wood with the farmer creating them from the raw material available. The first farm work was done by hand with a hoe to cut down weeds and prepare the soil for planting with an axe or fire to help clear the forest for planting. The first animal power to be widely applied to farming in Britain were usually oxen employed to pull plows, harrows, carts and wagons. Horses were primarily used for pack animals and riding. The oxen were gradually displaced after 1700 by large work horses like the Shire horse and Clydesdale horse that were large horses that originally were bred to carry fully armoured knights. Horses became literally harnessed to the plows and wagons when the horse collar was widely adopted for use in Britain after about 1700. Oxen were gradually replaced since they did not take well to hard surfaced roads and were about 10% slower. Horses could be easily shod with iron horseshoes to protect their feet on hard surfaces. The horseshoes would typically wear out in 6-8 weeks and have to
Selective breeding

In England, Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced selective breeding (mating together two animals with particularly desirable characteristics), and inbreeding (the mating of close relatives, such as father and daughter, or brother and sister, to stabilize certain qualities) in order to reduce genetic diversity in desirable animals programs from the mid 18th century. Robert Bakewell cross-bred the Lincoln and Longhorn sheep to produce the New Leicester variety. These methods proved successful in the production of larger and more profitable livestock.

Sound advice on farming began to appear in England in the mid-17th century, from writers such as Samuel Hartlib, Walter Blith and others, but the overall agricultural productivity of Britain started to grow significantly only in the period of the Agricultural Revolution. It is estimated that the productivity of wheat was about 19 bushels per acre in 1720 and that it has grown to 21?22 bushels in the middle of the eighteenth century. It declined slightly in the decades of 1780 and 1790 but it began to grow again by the end of the century and reached a peak in the 1840s around 30 bushels per acre, stabilising thereafter.The Agricultural Revolution in Britain proved to be a major turning point in history. The population in 1750 reached the level of 5.7 million. This had happened before: in around 1350 and again in 1650. Each time, either the appropriate agricultural infrastructure to support a population this high was not present or plague or war occurred (which may have been related), a Malthusian catastrophe occurred, and the population fell. However, by 1750, when the population reached this level again, an onset in agricultural technology and new methods without outside disruption, and also the effects of sugar imports, allowed the population growth to be sustained.The increase in population led to more demand from the people for goods such as clothing. A new class of landless labourers, products of enclosure, provided the basis for cottage industry, a stepping stone to the Industrial Revolution. To supply continually growing demand, shrewd businessmen began to pioneer new technology to meet demand from the people. This led to the first industrial factories. People who once were farmers moved to large cities to get jobs in the factories. The British Agricultural Revolution not only made the population increase possible, but also increased the yield per agricultural worker, meaning that a larger percentage of the population could no longer work in agriculture but could and/or had to work in these new, post?Agricultural Revolution jobs.The British Agricultural Revolution was the cause of drastic changes in the lives of British women. Before the Agricultural Revolution, women worked alongside their husbands in the fields and were an active part of farming. The increased efficiency of the new machinery, along with the fact that this new machinery was often heavier and difficult for a woman to work, made this unnecessary and impractical, and women were relegated to other roles in society. To supplement the family's income, many went into cottage industries. Others became domestic servants or were forced into professions such as prostitution. The new, limited roles of women, dubbed by one historian as "this defamation of women workers" (Valenze), fuelled prejudices of women only being fit to work in the home, and also effectively separated them from the new, mechanised areas of work, leading to a divide in the pay between men and women.Towards the end of the 19th century, the substantial gains in British agricultural productivity wer
See also

Agricultural gang

Division of labour

Urbanization

Neolithic Revolution

Arab Agricultural Revolution

Green Revolution