Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

260 Agricultural Revolutions and Change

not damage the environment; extensification harmed the livelihoods of poor
households by removing their rights and access to the common property resources
on which they so heavily relied.

Views of innovation and adoption

Until the last two decades, orthodoxy has held that the British agricultural revolu-
tion began about 1760 and ended in the early 1800s (Ernle, 1912). Credit for
progress was given to a few, now famous, innovators: Tull for his corn drill, Town-
shend for turnips, Coke for the Norfolk Four Course rotation, Bakewell for live-
stock breeding, and Young for promoting all of these. The conventional view is
that, once exposed to these innovations, the majority of farmers adopted them and
the revolution occurred. However, claims for innovation rapidly driving produc-
tion growth have not survived scrutiny. Some have suggested that all improve-
ments began by the 1580s, spread rapidly in the 1600s, and were completed by
1767 (Kerridge, 1967); whilst others suspect there was no major discontinuity,
and that gradual change occurred throughout a period beginning at about 1600
and lasting to the 1840s, when further rapid change occurred as a result of increased
use of external inputs (Overton 1984b; Thirsk, 1987).
What is now clear is that Tull, Townshend, Coke, Bakewell and Young were
simply good popularizers rather than innovators. All ‘their’ innovations were being
practised by some farmers 50–100 years before they were born (Table 12.1). The
lasting fascination for ‘inventors’ has diverted attention away from the process of dif-
fusion and adoption, and it remains to this day a heresy to many agricultural scien-
tists to suggest that farmers have much to say in the process of technology generation,
diffusion and adaptation (see Rhoades, 1989). Yet in the British agricultural revolu-
tion they were centrally involved in all three. Farmers made diffusion active rather

Table 12.1 The first known dates of innovative technologies and techniques and the

later popularizers associated with them

Innovation First known Popularizers and their lifespan

Seed Drill 1600 Jethro Tull (1674–1741)

Turnips Late 1500s Charles ‘Turnip’ Townsend

(1674–1738); Arthur Young

(1741–1820)

Artifical ‘Grasses’ (including

clovers, sainfoin, trefoil, lucerne,

rye grass, rib grass, etc.)

1620–1640 Thomas Coke (1754–1842);

Townshend; Young

Norfolk Four Course Rotation late 1600s Coke; Young

Selective Breeding of Livestock late 1600s–1700s Robert Bakewell (1725–1795)

Irrigated Watermeadows late 1500s Bakewell; Young

Sources: Bowie, 1987b; Donaldson, 1854; Gamier, 1896; Hartlib, 1646; Jones, 1967; Overton,
1985; Parker, 1975; Young, 1786