Agriculture

Abstract

It is now a commonplace of English agricultural history of the nineteenth century that farmers feared that repeal of the corn laws would ruin English agriculture, but that, on the contrary, the repeal ushered in the period of the greatest prosperity the English farmers enjoyed throughout the century. In the first few years after the repeal, however, it was not so clear to contemporaries as it has subsequently become to historians, that agriculture was not heading for ruin. Though wheat prices were higher in the year following repeal than they had been for many years, they fell persistently for the next three years, while imports of grain more than doubled between 1846 and 1849. Moreover, taking the long view, grain farmers observed that while, in spite of higher yields, wheat prices in the late 1840s stood at about the same level they had been three-quarters of a century before, butter and wool had doubled their prices, and meat prices had risen by seventy per cent. Thus, by 1850, the worst prognostications expressed by the agriculturalists during the repeal controversy appeared to have been amply justified. It was against this background that there appeared, in April 1849, a brief pamphlet by a Wigtownshire farmer, James Caird, entitled High Farming, recommending that the challenge of unprotected farming be taken up by the substitution of improved, mixed farming for the traditional, predominantly grain, rotations.