In i6oo, European agricultural productivity was not much different than it had been two centuries earlier: about five bushels of grain per bushel sown in fertile areas, roughly one-tenth of the average yield today. Yields were even lower on poor soil or during the all too frequent droughts, late frosts, or heavy rains. The percentage of the labor force employed in food production was only slightly less than it had been centuries earlier, about two-thirds of the working population. During harvest, when armies of men, women, and children were needed to cut, gather, and stack grain, and then thresh it to separate the kernels from the stalks, even more people worked in the countryside. Two centuries later, these numbers had still not changed very much when looking at Europe as a whole. Only when mechanical reapers and threshers, steel plows, and other agricultural machinery gained widespread use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did the numbers of people employed in agriculture plummet, and only with chemical fertilizers did yields skyrocket.
Aggregate numbers hide great regional variations, however, for during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries agriculture in some parts of Europe underwent tremendous changes. These included new crops and crop rotation schedules, altered patterns of landownership, selective breeding of stock and plants, and increases in the amount of land put under cultivation through the draining of marshes and coastal areas and the clearing of woodlands. In areas where these changes were introduced, first the Netherlands and then England, agricultural workers produced between 50 and 175 percent more than farmers elsewhere. This meant that there was more surplus to sell, and in both places governments and private investors encouraged the building of canals to get produce to local and regional markets, and in some cases into ships carrying goods internationally. That surplus also allowed many rural residents to purchase consumer goods that those ships brought in, or to make further improvements to their property.
In many of these developments, the Dutch led the way, combining technological and organizational innovations to improve agriculture just as they used them to speed up the production of ships and textiles. By the fourteenth century, the Netherlands - including both Flanders and what later became the Dutch Republic - was one of the most urbanized parts of Europe, which created a steady demand for agricultural products. As we saw in chapter 6, this led farmers to work their land more intensively, and to experiment with crop rotation patterns that would lessen the amount of time land needed to be left fallow. They discovered that planting legumes such as beans, peas, alfalfa, or clover actually made the soil richer, increasing the next year’s grain crop from that land. Agricultural scientists would later learn that this effect resulted from legumes converting atmospheric nitrogen into the soil nitrates needed by grain crops, but farmers experimented with crop rotations long before anyone understood the chemistry behind them. In the eighteenth century farmers added turnips and potatoes to their rotation patterns, and often increased the frequency with which they grew hay. These crops increased the amount of food available for animals, allowing rural residents to build up their herds of sheep and cattle and feed them over the winter instead of slaughtering most of them in the fall. Farmers in the Netherlands experimented with livestock breeding as well as crop rotation, cross-breeding cattle to select for those that would produce more or higher-quality milk or meat. Dutch butter and cheese became known throughout Europe and beyond. More and bigger animals meant more manure for fertilizer, which improved the productivity of the fields even further.
Along with more intensive use of existing land, the Dutch also created new land. They built dikes and walls out into the sea along their shallow coast, and then drained the land behind the walls. The average elevation of the already Low Countries grew even lower with such large-scale drainage projects, in which new fields, called polders, were bordered by ditches and canals, the largest of which could be used for transport. (Today 27 percent of the Netherlands, with 60 percent of its population, lies under sea level, and the maintenance of sea walls is an important national issue.) Pumps powered by windmills helped keep the land dry.
This process of draining could also be used for marshes and swamps, and by the seventeenth century landowners and rulers in other parts of Europe were hiring Dutch engineers to carry out similar projects. They built canals and reclaimed land for Italian princes, French cities, and the Spanish crown, and built mines in Poland, Russia, and other Baltic areas. In 1619, King Gustavus Adolphus decided he needed a city on the west coast of Sweden that was well fortified to fend off Danish attacks. He used Dutch plans for canals and fortifications and hired Dutch engineers and workers to construct this city of Goteborg (Gothenburg), which they modeled on the Dutch colony of Batavia on the island of Java (now Jakarta in Indonesia). The majority of the first city council was Dutch, and in 1731 Goteborg became the home of the Swedish East India Company, modeled on the similar Dutch company.
Dutch innovations found their readiest market in England, where landlords were already enclosing fields and common lands to create sheep-runs, selling their wool to the growing textile industry. Enclosed fields, controlled by a single owner rather than a village community, could be easily planted in an innovative rotation pattern if the owner thought this would be even more profitable than wool. Viscount Charles Townshend (1674-1738) was an advocate of such changes; he had seen what the Dutch could do while serving as English ambassador to the Netherlands, and he returned to his huge estates extolling the virtues of new crops and methods. He advocated a four-field system of crop rotation, with each field planted successively in two kinds of grain, legumes, and turnips; each of these crops either adds nutrients to the soil or absorbs nutrients differently, so that no land has to be left fallow. This system was already being used by some farmers in England, and Townshend encouraged the farmers who leased his lands to adopt it, which led his fellow landowners to nickname him “Turnip” Townshend.
Sowing grain - which formed the bulk of the European diet - was done through scattering seeds by hand, and various inventors tried to build machines that would put the seeds in the soil in a regular pattern instead of haphazardly on top of it. Jethro Tull (1674-1741), the son of a gentleman farmer, developed the first mechanical seed drill that worked. Drawn by horses, his seed drill made rows of small trenches in the soil and dropped seeds into them, using less seed than sowing by hand. Tull’s seed drill is seen as the ancestor of modern farm machinery because it was the first successful agricultural machine with inner moving parts. It was complicated and expensive, however, and seed drills were not widely adopted until the early nineteenth century. Tull also invented a horse-drawn hoe for weeding and modified existing plow designs, but none of these brought him great success. He ended his days unhappily on the estate he had hopefully named Prosperous Farm, a title that turned out to be more ironic than accurate.
Many innovators were aristocrats or gentry who had the wealth and leisure to contemplate new methods, but some were individuals who actually worked the land themselves. Robert Bakewell (1725-95), born into a family of tenant farmers, traveled around Europe observing agricultural methods. He experimented with flooding fields to improve hay yields and built special stalls for cattle in which they would not lie in their own manure, which kept them healthier, yielded more manure for fertilizer, and lessened the amount of straw needed for bedding, thus increasing the straw available for animal feed. He was especially interested in intensive selective breeding, and separated males from females in his herds so that he could breed specific individuals. He bred cattle and sheep that produced more meat, as did other experimental farmers, turning beef and mutton from foods for the upper classes into staples of the English diet.
Landowners in England also emulated Dutch techniques of gaining new land. They brought in Dutch engineers and technicians to design and build drainage projects in
The marshy areas of eastern England called the fens, turning them from low-intensity use into high-intensity fields. Woods and hillsides were also cleared and planted in clover or turnips, which could grow on poor soil and provide still more food for animals.
All of these changes created an agricultural system that was sustainable over the long haul and produced a steadily increasing amount of food.
Changes in rural life were gradual, but their cumulative result could be very disruptive. When fields were enclosed, land that had been held in common by the whole village became the property of one individual or one family; individuals were supposed to receive land in proportion to their share of the open fields, but large landowners often got a disproportionate share of the better land. This was particularly true after 1750, when enclosure was more often by Act of Parliament than by an agreement among local landowners. Enclosed property often included not just existing fields, but also woods and scrub areas where poorer people raised a few pigs or geese, and gathered nuts, coal, stone, and firewood for their own use or to augment their meager incomes. Enclosure, and sometimes even the rumor of impending enclosure, sparked protests, threats, and occasionally riots. In 1631, for example, a crowd of several thousand people gathered in Gloucestershire to protest the sale of royal forests to entrepreneurs for subdivision; the crowds destroyed fences, burned down the houses of the encloser’s agents, and finally burned an effigy of the encloser himself, Sir Giles Mompesson. In 1753, armed crowds broke into the area where a noble landowner had begun raising rabbits for the urban market, killing thousands of the animals they believed destroyed grazing lands.
World History
