(^94) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
Some writers on wildlife employ the term ‘ high farming ’ to describe the
new agricultural methods of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
which I have just described. 10 But this term is more correctly used for the
more industrialized forms of agriculture that emerged from the 1840s. 11
‘ High farming ’ was a high-input, high-output system which relied more
on manufactured and imported materials, and which substituted durable
fixtures and machines for high and regular inputs of labour. 12 One novel
feature was the use of imported or manufactured fertilizers. Guano came
into widespread use in the 1840s and ‘ 50s, together with bone dust, and
in the 1840s superphosphates were developed by John Bennett Lawes:
by the 1870s four million pounds were being spent each year on this
particular commodity. 13 Another key innovation was the use of oil cake,
a by-product of the rape and linseed oil extraction industries, as animal
fodder. Although turnips, mangold wurzels, and swedes continued to be
the main form of winter feed, the national consumption of cake rose from
around 24,000 tons in 1825 to 160,000 in 1870. 14 The spread of the rail
network helped ensure that by the 1870s, in the arable east of England,
few farms lay more than ten miles from a supplier. 15 Livestock numbers
rose still further, and the resultant increase in manure would have boosted
cereal yields even without the use of the new fertilizers. Equally important
figure 18 In the course of the ‘agricultural revolution’ arable farming came to be
more and more concentrated in the drier east of England. Left: the farming regions
of England, as sketched by James Caird in 1851. Right, the proportion of land
under cultivation in c.1840, based on the information contained in the tithe files (for
methodology, see Williamson, 2002). Caird simplified the pattern of farming, but not
radically. Both diagrams can be usefully compared with Figure 2.
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