The Industrial Revolution transformed Britain and established a blueprint for the modern world. But how much of this do we owe to the humble turnip? For the Industrial Revolution to occur, two things needed to happen.
First, the population needed to grow. And second, a greater proportion of that population had to be able to leave the fields to work in factories. In short, the Industrial Revolution required a revolution in agriculture. Let's look at England. Between 1750 and 1850, the population increased from 5.7 to 16.6 million people.
This was unprecedented. The population had reached 5 million before, but had never managed to grow much beyond this figure. Why was this? Well, the main reason is that this was about as many people as English farms could feed.
How then did English agriculture come to sustain a 190% increase in the population? increase in the size of the population after 1750? The simple answer is that English farming became far more productive.
As Professor Kenneth Morgan explains, at the heart of the agricultural advance in the 18th century lay attempts to improve the extent and fertility of the soil under cultivation. The amount of arable, crop-producing land doubled. This was partly achieved through the cultivation of new land for crops. But more significant than this, was the phasing out of leaving land fallow once every four years.
This traditional practice had been adopted to help the soil recover its nutrients, but this meant that in 1700, for instance, up to 20% of the land was in this fallow, unproductive state. By 1851, this figure had dropped to just 4%. How was this achieved? The answer is the introduction of the four-crop rotation.
Wheat, barley, clover, and you guessed it, turnips. Clover and turnips were ideal crops for making animal feed, which meant more livestock could be reared, resulting in more dung, which could be used to fertilize the soil. Clover also had the helpful property of dramatically increasing the transfer of nitrogen from the atmosphere to the soil itself, also helping to make the land more fertile and productive, leading to better harvests.
More livestock, combined with selective breeding that made animals larger, also meant there was more meat available. at market, resulting in lower prices for the consumer. It was this supply of cheap food which led to the population boom and enabled more people to live and labour in the growing industrial cities.
But wait, there's more to this story than dung, soil fertility and crop yields. Exciting though these things are. More efficient land management and technology also play a part.
The former was achieved in part by the process of parliamentary enclosure. where an act of parliament made it easier for landlords to put barriers around their land, both literally and in law. This gradually replaced the low-intensity open-field system with high-intensity and often specialised farming, where under the old system, farm labourers had tilled a strip of land in a common field, either for themselves or the lord of the manor.
Under the new system, fields were enclosed by hedges and ditches, creating the rural landscape we recognise today. Enclosure accelerated the trend of grouping small holdings together into larger farms, so that by 1851, 80% of farmed land was made up of 100-acre-plus estates. These professionally managed estates outcompeted many small holders, gradually squeezing them out of the market. This led to an increasingly polarized rural society, with large landowners and tenant farmers exploiting a landless laboring class who were dependent on weekly or monthly wages.
Enclosures also tended to lead to the loss of common land, lands upon which labourers had been able to graze their own animals and forage. This led to petitions, protests and even riots. Agricultural innovation also came in the form of new technologies. However, while seed drills and threshing machines certainly played a part, new machinery was not as significant as you may think.
There was often a significant lag. between invention and widespread application, with the majority of work still being done by man and horsepower. Arguably more significant were simple innovations in hand tools, such as the gradual replacement of the sickle with the scythe.
This accounts for the fact that while agricultural labourers decreased as a proportion of the overall workforce as the population grew, the actual numbers still working the land remained high. Did all this equate to an agricultural revolution? Turnips, hedges and hand tools didn't transform Britain overnight, but a transformation did occur. One that enabled more Britons than ever before to live in cities, work in factories and help build the modern world we live in today.