How farming changed from the 1700's -1800's?

Question

How farming changed from the 1700's -1800's?

Answer 1

Wal.......... they don't plow with hosses anymore.....

Answer 2

Improved technology made it easier to farm more land with fewer people.   A plow with a single blade was not as efficient as a horse drawn plow that could do three rows at a time.  A reaper that could cut grain across three rows (also horse-drawn) was far more efficient than a bunch of men with scythes.

Answer 3

There were massive changes in farming practices during the 18th century.  In 'Giant Marrows and Racing Pigeons', Harry Pearson writes:

"In the mid-eighteenth century, the huge social changes that followed the industrial revolution set testing new problems for British farmers.  During that period Britain changed from an agrarian to an urban society.  In the late 1700s, 75 per cent of the population lived in the countryside, but the balance was already shifting rapidly.  Prior to the upheaval, the bulk of British farming had been done by smallholders, cottagers and crofters.  It was subsistence farming, the mainstay of a peasant economy.  Most Britons had been, to a greater or lesser extent, self-sufficient when it came to food.  They kept geese, a pig, and possibly a milking cow or a goat: they had a share in a communal flock of sheepp and grew their own vegetables.  Now, sucked into serve the manufactures, living in the hastily built cities in cramped houses in marrow streets, they could no longer feed themselves.  The good news for landowners was that these recently converted urbanites had just enough cash to pay someone else to do it for them.  Which would have been easy enough had it not been for the fact that, amid upping sticks and heading for the dark Satanic mills and the roaring flames of the foundries, the population had somehow found the time to double itself.  For close to 10,000 years farming had evolved as slwoly as the rest of society, now the sudden acceleration of social changed demanded a swift and thorough response from agriculturalitsts.  It got one.  At the forefront was a cadre of radicals who were determined to foment a farming revolution in Britain.  Oddly enough, one of the leading firebrands was the ruling monarch, George III.  Farmer George, as he was nicknamed, imported merino sheep from spain to Britain, formed the Board of Agriculture and put royal land at Windsowr, Kew, Mortlake and the Old Deer Park to work.

The Duke of Bedofrd set up a model farm at Woburn and organised ploughing matches, the Earl of Egremont turned part of Petworth House into an agricultural college, deforested his great deeer park so it could be turned over to tillage, andput new selective-breeding techniques to such good use that his horses won the Oaks and the Derby more frequenty than any other breeder; Lord Townsend took an obsessive interest in root crops, earning himself the name 'Turnip' in the process, and thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, transformed the estate at Holkham Hall from one for which tenants could not be found, even at a rent of five shillings an cre, into one of the most productive and profitable in Britain.  

Profit and productivity now met the peasant in a battle for the countryside.  In order to boost output, thousands of enclosure Acts, which transferred land from communal to individual ownership, were passed by parliament.  Between 1700 and 1844 close to six million acres of Britain found its way into private hands.  The battle to feed the new urban population had wrought a change in rural life almost as great as that which sparked the struggle in the first place.

Denied the common grazing land on which they relied, harassed by landowners whose vast tracts of property entitled them to greater parish voting rights and who consequently controlled the distribution of newly enclosed land, the smallholders were crushed.  The option of self-employment having been withdrawn, they either moved to the towns and sought work with a manufacturer, or stayed put and took a job with the landowners who had driven them under.  a population that had once worked for itself now, in the main, worked for others.

This is one of the saddest chapters in British history, not least, it seems to me, because it marks an important change: it is possible to lay the blame for all human tragedies in the Middle Ages and before on either 'acts of God' (the Black Death, fire of London) or the greed and general wickedness of individuals (examples too numerous to mention).  The Enclosure Acts were different.  However corruptly implemented, they were a necessity, without them, Britain would have faced famine and social collapse.  They are the first example of huge injustice born of economic expediency, as such, you might say that they signal the moment when the destiny of mankind was handed over to the financial system.'