Arable farming 1840

[Top-of-the-hill]

   I was having a discussion yesterday with a relative, a semi professional historian, about tithe maps of East Kent (my area of interest). He was rather surprised at the size of some of the arable fields, up to about 40 acres, and raised something I hadn't thought of - how did they cultivate it with the equipment available? In 1851 one of the farms (all tenanted) was 290 acres, employing 14 labourers.

[Vance Mead]

I don't suppose a farm of 290 acres would all be arable, and wouldn't all be ploughed or harvested at the same time. There would be hedges, ditches and access roads that would take some acreage. They would have horses for ploughing, and cattle and sheep for milk, meat and fertiliser, so some of that acreage would be for meadow and pasture. Some portion would be fallow each year. The cropped area would also be divided in two, with spring and autumn crops, which would also spread out the workload.

It was still very hard work, but 14 labourers could handle about 20 acres each.

[Top-of-the-hill]

  Thanks Vance, I haven't analysed it (a project for winter?) but I think there was more arable than stock on these farms. Spring and Autumn crops is a good thought, and there would have been fodder crops for the horses. I suppose ploughing went on through any decentish weather all winter.
   I have just remembered a cutting I have of the farm stock sale in 1857 of one of the farms in question. Among the implements were three 4-horse ploughs.

[MollyC]

Tom Williamson is a landscape historian at University of East Anglia.  He has written about the limiting factor on arable land being the number of days when it is dry enough to use a plough, which depends on soil type and rainfall totals.  It is why, generally, the east of Great Britain is more suited to arable and the west to livestock.  However our ancestors had to run mixed farms in order to be self-sufficient to greater extent than we need to now.  You do not need to grow fodder for tractors!

[Top-of-the-hill]

  Our climate here is on the dry side, but we do have a lot of clay soil, clay-with-flints in fact!

[Vance Mead]

Tom Williamson was writing about the heavy clay soils of the Midlands. These soils retain water and are difficult to plough, particularly when wet. There is a narrow window when they are dry enough - but not too dry - for spring ploughing. This was the reason for the open fields of the Midlands, with long strips of arable and large plough teams. East Anglia had drier, lighter soils that didn't require large plough teams. So farmland was enclosed from an early date or was never open fields. The drier, lighter soils were 'hungry', meaning that nutrients leached out. So they needed a lot of livestock to maintain fertility.

[Barbara F]

When researching my West Kent farming family I found the General View of Agriculture County Surveys very helpful.

This is a link to The Kent survey that I used.

https://archive.org/details/b22037585/page/n7/mode/2up

Barbara

[Top-of-the-hill]

  Thanks, Barbara, I will give that a try. The Internet Archive is a great resource.

[hanes teulu]

I read an extract of Cuthbert Johnson's 1841 "On increasing the demand for Agricultural Labour" in a newspaper and found it on Google Books -
https://books.googleusercontent.com/books/content?req=AKW5Qadgip2gYBKIeZswCBm2_zNgjDagYjAVldgKyrRY27EhWLspNa8uy_07bNSMOgIIs2nGbWQt-F7nK2wynxIH1hCyk9tNpMQKDNvrcSWLS_D--ulu-VX5OAVIvX4T1Izxhow_rK7VQoQLDrUDicVfooYfoKCjG3aFs7UNcE4ONmqOcGA1wclEZeXr2JxGAxKfZZ3BAv4XBYkL0273J8bpQY4ar-P3i0zT-3QusPD8SZf9nn8LW_tQ-xherWK1-uxxROMPVqXoKQWNbekynMXmzTznQ42gqA