284 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
and ‘the money was drank at the ale house’ (Young, 1791, in Humphries, 1990).
Generally those people living in diverse landscapes fared better than those in the
monocropped cereal lands. Of the arable lands Cobbett said there were ‘no hedges,
no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes ... and the wretched labourer has not a
stick of wood, and has not place for a pig or cow to graze. What a difference there
is between the faces you see here, and the round, red faces that you see in the
wealds and forests’ (Cobbett, 1830). Extensification into uncultivated lands to
improve aggregate food production should thus be treated with caution unless
there has been full quantification of their economic value to poor people’s liveli-
hoods, and necessary steps taken to offset damage.
The success of intensification during the British agricultural revolution would
appear to suggest three important strategies for agricultural development of
resource-poor lands today:
1 reform of national and regional research, extension and planning to create a
dialogue with farming households, with particular emphasis upon sensitive
survey techniques to discover indigenous practices and the promotion of tech-
nology generation and adaptation by farmers themselves;
2 national and regional support to farmer-to-farmer extension mechanisms to
increase the speed of diffusion;
3 adjustment of national pricing and subsidy policies to support the intensifica-
tion of on-farm resources so as to increase productivity without damaging the
natural resource base.
There do, however, remain many uncertainties. It is still unclear why delays of
100–200 years in diffusion occurred – particularly, what role did the invention of
extension mechanisms play? It is also far from clear what role population increase
played – did increasing population drive the need to increase food production, or
did more people simply mean greater likelihood of passive diffusion? Most his-
torical evidence of experimentation relates to larger tenant and landlord farmers –
is this because only larger farmers can afford to take the risks attendant upon
experiments and trials, or is the record biased because it is their documents that
have survived to this day? To what extent, then, does the small farmer experiment?
And lastly, to what extent did the benefits of intensification on resource-poor lands
offset the damage caused by extensification and loss of common property resources?
Answers to these and related questions would provide us with a more precise and
better understanding of the invention, extension and adaptation processes under-
lying agricultural revolutions.