Technology Adaptation: Agricultural Revolution in 17th–19th-Century Britain 269Technology Adaptation
These extension mechanisms brought new knowledge to many more farmers. Yet
knowledge of an innovation does not imply adoption. Farmers, once exposed to an
innovation, still had to decide whether to adopt according to locally perceived
incentives and constraints.
Incentives to adopt
The overriding incentives to adopt a new technology relate to the investment
required and the perceived rate of return. An innovation requiring no new training
or capital investment and bringing returns in the same season would be favoured
over one that was costly, risky and producing benefits far in the future. Bringing
quick returns for low investment were fodder crops, intensified rotation patterns
and manures; livestock breeding was not costly, yet it could take time to produce
the desired animal; but new machinery, drainage and irrigation required much
greater investment.
Changes in prices could affect these perceptions. The increase in value of live-
stock products relative to cereals in the early 18th century favoured diversification,
so increasing fodder and manure production (Beckett, 1990). Greater diversity on
the farm also meant lower risk of complete harvest failure. But to adopt new tech-
nologies farmers required some security of tenure. Tenant right guaranteed them
financial returns for the unexhausted improvements they made, but was only com-
mon in southeast and midland England. Thomas Moses, an improving and experi-
menting farmer of the 1820s–1840s in Lincolnshire, farmed on an annual lease
with no covenants, except that he farmed ‘in a tenant-like manner’ (Beastall, 1978).
To ensure he would receive full compensation on quitting the lease he recorded
details of all improvements – repairs to farm buildings, stables, fences, ditches and
roads; the purchases of ploughs and harrows; the planting of trees; and the estab-
lishment of a kitchen garden. Short leases, although a disincentive to invest when
there was no tenant right, could easily be changed to account for new technologi-
cal opportunities.
There was also a gradual change toward granting of long leases – Coke granted
them for 7, 14 and 21 years so as to encourage investment. As James Caird, a later
tourer, put it in 1852, ‘the investment of a tenant’s capital in land seldom contem-
plates an immediate return. He does not anticipate that a large expenditure in
cleaning and enriching worn-out land will be all repaid to him in the first crop. He
lays the foundation for a series of good crops, which in the aggregate he expects to
repay him with interest If he drains, makes fences, or other improvements of a
more permanent character, a still longer period is requisite to compensate him’
(Caird, 1852).
It has been long assumed that the conversion of open fields to private property
farming was in itself an added incentive to adoption of new technologies – poten-
tial improvers could not fight the inflexibility of collective decisions that stuck to