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

Technology Adaptation: Agricultural Revolution in 17th–19th-Century Britain 273

in Suffolk, described an experiment on a wheat field divided into six small plots
(Biddell, 1817–21). The plots were treated with 2lbs of salt, 1 bushel wood ashes,
1 bushel fine cinders, ammonia tar water and tar, and soap boiler’s ashes, with a
sixth control having no manure. Unfortunately there is no record of which treat-
ment performed best, though he did record in another memo that all cereal har-
vested from experimental plots was taken to separate threshing sites so that yields
could be measured and compared. In 1823 he described a complex experiment
involving treatments for barley cultivation according to sowing method, manure
type and freshness of the manure (Biddell, 1821–24). The treatment for each of
the 13 sections of the field varied according to sowing technique (drilling or dib-
bling), manure freshness (straight from the stable door or exposed for a month),
manure type (horse manure, sprats), and order of treatment (manuring first or
sowing first). He indicated the ‘best corn after the 70 bushels of sprats’. Figure 12.1
is a reproduction of another experiment to compare manuring with ashes, live-
stock manures and green manuring.
Some farmers experimented in order gradually to improve patchy quality
fields. Thomas Moses’s experimental approach on his Lincolnshire farm produced

Table 12.2 Technologies for sustaining, restoring or improving soil fertility used during

the agricultural revolution

From within village community

• Livestock manure


• Green manure crops


• Seaweed, ploughed in green


• Nitrogen-fixing crops


• Compost heaps of weeds, rushes, bracken, old thatch


• Fish such as pre-rotted sticklebacks, pilchards, sprats


• Ashes


• Peat and turves


• Pond mud


• Soot


• Old clothing and footwear


• Leaf mould from woodlands


• Sand


• Pigeons’ dung


• Fruit pulp


• Sawdust
  From outside village community


• Night soil from cities and towns


• Other refuse from cities and towns


• Industrial wastes, including pulverized slags, soap, ashes, waste bark from
  tanneries, shoddy from textile factories


• Oil cake (from crushed seed of coleseed)


• Bone meal

Sources: Mingay, 1977; Kerridge, 1967