1. T. Bedford Franklin, Good Pastures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 24.

2. Ibid., 25-27.

3. According to L. B. Wrenn, "Cotton Gins and Cottonseed Oil Mills in the New South," Agricultural History 68 (1994): 232-33, the processing of cottonseed oil on a commercial scale began in New Orleans in 1855. By 1879 there were 45 cottonseed mills in the Mississippi Valley. At the industry's peak in 1914, the number had grown to 882.

4. T. Bedford Franklin, A History of Agriculture (London: Bell and Sons, 1948), 160.

5. F. M. L. Thompson, "The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880," EHR , 2d series, 21 (1968): 63-65.

6. Ibid., 67-68, 75. According to James Johnston, Contributions to Scientific Agriculture (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1849), 3-5, the Agricultural Chemistry Association of Scotland began to influence enlightened Scottish farmers as early as 1842.

7. Roy Brigden, Victorian Farms (Marlborough: Crowood Press, 1986), 196-206; John Sheail, "Elements of Sustainable Agriculture: The UK Experience, 1840-1940," AHR 43 (1995): 178-92.

8. Brigden, Victorian Farms , 70; Richard Grove, "Coprolite Mining in Cambridgeshire," AHR 24 (1976): 136-43; Joan Thirsk, "Suffolk Farming in the Nineteenth Century," in Suffolk Farming in the Nineteenth Century , ed. J. Thirsk

and J. Imray (Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1958), 24. Philip Bagwell, The Transport Revolution (London: Routledge, 1988), 108, notes that Britain imported 1,700 tons of guano in 1841 and 200,000 tons in 1847, when the extent of the railway system had grown to 4,000 miles.

9. Jonathan Brown and H. A. Beecham, "Arable Farming," in The Agrarian History of England and Wales , vol. 6, ed. G. E. Mingay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 278-81; Thompson, "Second Agricultural Revolution," 68-70; Journal of the Board of Agriculture 13 (1906-7): 67-72; B. A. Holder-ness, "Agriculture and Industrialization in the Victorian Economy," in The Victorian Countryside , vol. 1, ed. G. E. Mingay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 191-95; F. Falkner, The Muck Manual (London: Murray, 1843), 39, 95. According to Barbara Kerr, Bound to the Soil (London: Baker, 1968), 52, Dorset farmers also dug up ant hills, mixed this soil with lime, and applied it to their fields.

10. See, for example, James Archibald Cambell, "Report on the Application of Sewage," THASS 1 (1866): 1-20. John J. Mechi used a "hose and pipe" system on his farm; see Mechi, "The Sewage of Towns as It Affects British Agriculture," Farmer's Magazine , 3d series, 17 (1860): 254-55. For a modern discussion, see Nicholas Goddard, '''A Mine of Wealth'? The Victorians and the Agricultural Value of Sewage," Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 274-90.

11. Barrow Wall, "The Agriculture of Pembrokeshire," JRASE , 2d series, 23 (1887): 82-94.

12. Augustus Voelcker, "On the Commercial Value of Artificial Manures," JRASE 23 (1862): 277-78.

13. E. L. Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 191-99.

14. Rowland Prothero [Lord Ernle], English Farming Past and Present (London: Longmans, 1912), 370.

15. Paul A. David, "The Landscape and the Machine: Technical Interrelated-ness, Land Tenure and the Mechanization of the Corn Harvest in Victorian Britain," in Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840 , ed. Donald McCloskey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 145-214. Mark Overton, "Agriculture," in Atlas of Industrializing Britain, 1780-1914 , ed. John Langton and R. J. Morris (London: Methuen, 1986), 36, estimates that between 1840 and 1900, output per worker rose by about seventy percent, some of this gain due to the use of steam-powered threshing machines but also the result of improvements in plows and horse-pulled machinery.

16. H. V. Massingham, introduction to H. E. Bates et al, The English Countryside (London: Batsford, 1939), 4-8.

17. Robert Allen, "Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution," in The Economic History of Britain Since 1700 , 2d ed., vol. 1, ed. Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114.

18. C. K. Harley, "Skilled Labour and the Choice of Technique in Edwardian Industry," Explorations in Economic History 11 (1974): 391-414.

19. Norman Gash, Aristocracy and People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 321.

20. J. R. Walton, "A Study in the Diffusion of Agricultural Machinery in the

Nineteenth Century," Research Paper no. 5, School of Geography, Oxford (1973), 8, includes a chart showing adoption curves for various implements between 1820 and 1880.

21. E. J. Collins, "The Age of Machinery," in Victorian Countryside , vol. 1, ed. Mingay, 211-12.

22. David H. Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting, 1840-1900 (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 15-19.

23. Hugh Prince, "Victorian Rural Landscapes," in Victorian Countryside , vol. 1, ed. Mingay, 18; W. Harwood Long, "The Development of Mechanization in English Farming," AHR 11 (1963): 15-26.

24. Ian Carter, Farmlife in Northeast Scotland , 1840-1914 (Edinburgh: Donald, 1979), 88-90.

25. Prothero [Ernle], English Farming , 372.

26. E. J. Collins, "The Diffusion of the Threshing Machine in Britain, 1790-1880," Tools and Tillage 2 (1972): 19-20; John Weller, The History of the Farmstead (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 156.

27. Lord Willoughby de Eresby, Ploughing by Steam (London: Ridgway, 1850). His California plow and apparatus required seven men to operate and one man and a horse to haul coal and water for the engine.

28. Clark C. Spence, God Speed the Plow (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 105-34; David Grigg, English Agriculture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 149-66; Brigden, Victorian Farms , 153-58; Bagwell, Transport Revolution , 131-32.

29. Jonathan Brown and H. A. Beecham, "Implements and Machines," in Agrarian History , vol. 6, ed. Mingay, 307.

30. T. Barker, "The Transport Revolution from 1770 in Retrospect," in On the Move , ed. Chris Wrigley and John Sheperd (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 5-7.

31. Richard Moore-Colyer, "Aspects of Horse Breeding and the Supply of Horses in Victorian Britain," AHR 43 (1955): 47, 58.

32. Grigg, English Agriculture , 150; F. M. L. Thompson, "Nineteenth Century Horse Sense," EHR , 2d series, 29 (1976): 60-79; "Basic Slag," Journal of the Board of Agriculture 13 (April 1906-March 1907): 347.

33. J. A. Scott Watson and May Hobbs, Great Farmers (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1937), 90-100.

34. John J. Mechi, A Lecture on British Agriculture (London: Longmans, 1852), 15.

35. Ibid., 14.

36. John J. Mechi, How I Make Farming Pay (London: 1875), 5.

37. Ibid.

38. Mechi, Lecture on British Agriculture , 25.

39. Ibid., 27-28.

40. John J. Mechi, A Series of Letters on Agricultural Improvement (London: Longmans, 1845), introduction.

41. Léonce de Lavergne [Guilhaud], The Rural Economy of England, Scotland, and Ireland , trans. "A Scottish Farmer" (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1855),

221-23; see also Stuart Macdonald, "Model Farms," in Victorian Countryside, vol>221-23; see also Stuart Macdonald, "Model Farms," in Victorian Countryside , vol. 1, ed. Mingay, 220-22.

42. H. Rider Haggard, Rural England , vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1902), 528.

43. John Prout, Profitable Clay Farming under a Just System of Tenant Right , 3d ed. (London: Stanford, 1881), 7-36, 81. A second generation of the Prout-Voelcker team, W. A. Prout and John Voelcker, "Continuous corn growing in its practical and chemical aspects," JRASE 66 (1905): 47-51, reported that in 1905, the soil showed a net gain in phosphoric acid and potash and no loss of nitrogen, but it did lose some of its vegetable matter.

44. Prout, Profitable Clay Farming , 85-89.

45. Prout, who seems to have been far more concerned about the feasibility of using technology than Mechi, eventually sold his steam tackle and hired contractors to do the steam cultivating; see W. A. Prout and John Voelcker, "Continuous Corn Growing," 39.

46. According to E. J. Collins, "Harvest Technology and Labour Supply in Britain, 1790-1870," EHR 22 (1969): 453-73, improved hand tools, not mechanization, allowed a shrinking labor force to bring in harvests with increasing speed and efficiency; but see also J. A. Perkins, "Harvest Technology and Labour Supply in Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire, 1750-1850," Tools and Tillage 3 (1976-1977): 47-58, 125-35. According to Jonathan Brown, Agriculture in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 25-26, mostly horse-drawn machines harvested twenty-five percent of the English corn crop in 1871 and eighty percent in 1900.

47. Christabel Orwin, Progress in English Farming Systems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), iii—"A Specialist in Arable Farming," 7-24, and iv—"Another Departure in Plough Farming," 5, 14-16.

48. According to David Grigg, "Farm Size in England and Wales, from Early Victorian Times to the Present," AHR 35 (1987): 188, there was a reversal in this trend in the 1880s. Robert Allen, "Labor Productivity and Farm Size in English Agriculture before Mechanization: Reply to Clark," Explorations in Economic History 28 (1991): 478-92, argues that from the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth the average open-field farm of the south Midlands grew from 65 to 145 acres and that this increase ''reduced agricultural employment and boosted output per worker to record levels."

49. Prince, "Victorian Rural Landscapes," 18, 21.

50. Ibid., 7.

51. Lavergne, Rural , 2-14. Why British agriculture should have been more innovative is a question Lavergne avoids. For a recent (revisionist) analysis, see Colin Duncan, The Centrality of Agriculture (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), 55-80.

52. J. A. Scott Watson, "English Agriculture in 1850-51," JRASE 111 (1950): 9-24; James Caird, English Agriculture in 1850-51 (1852; 2d ed., New York: Kelly Reprints, 1967).

53. David Howell, "Farming in South-East Wales, 1840-1880," in Modern South Wales: Essays in Economic History , ed. Colin Baber and L. J. Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986), 82-95.

54. J. Geraint Jenkins, "Technological Improvement and Social Change in South Cardiganshire," AHR 13 (1965): 94-103.

55. Malcolm Gray, "The Regions and Their Issues: Scotland," in Victorian Countryside , vol. 1, ed. Mingay, 82-84; J. A. Symon, Scottish Farming (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1959), 178-80.

56. E. L. Jones, The Development of English Agriculture, 1815-1873 (London: Macmillan, 1968), 21.

57. The theme of two articles by Albert Pell, "The Making of the Land in England: A Retrospect," JRASE , 2d series, 23 (1887): 355-74, and "The Making of the Land of England: A Second Retrospect," JRASE , 3d series, 10 (1899): 136-41.

58. F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 245-56; Thompson, "Free Trade and the Land," in Victorian Countryside , vol. 1, ed. Mingay, 109; J. V. Beckett, The East Midlands from A.D. 1000 (Harlow: Longman, 1988), 207-8; P.J. Perry, British Farming in the Great Depression, 1870-1914 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1974), 19-20, 65-66, 123-25, 142-45; J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880 (London: Batsford, 1966), 167-68; Jones, Development , 30; David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 47-48; Richard N. Adams, Paradoxical Harvest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 73-74.

59. J. L. van Zanden, "The First Green Revolution: the Growth of Production and Productivity in European Agriculture, 1870-1914," EHR 44 (1991): 215-39; Brown, Agriculture, 55-56 .

60. Prothero [Ernie], English Farming , 380, 384.

61. T. W. Fletcher, "The Great Depression of English Agriculture, 1873-1896," EHR , 2d series, 13 (1960-1961): 417-32; Fletcher, "Lancashire Livestock Farming during the Great Depression," AHR 9 (1961): 17-42.

62. J. T. Coppock, "The Changing Face of England: 1850 circa 1900," in A New Historical Geography of England , ed. H. C. Darby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 615-18.

63. Gray, "Regions and Their Issues," in Victorian Countryside , vol. 1, ed. Mingay, 83, 90-92.

64. Carter, Farmlife in Northeast Scotland , 76-85.

65. David Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 2-18.

66. Peter Hall, "England circa 1900," in New Historical Geography , ed. Darby, 691-92. Overton, "Agriculture," 48, notes that statistics show that between 1873 and 1911, the area devoted to market gardens grew by an ''astonishing" 145 percent—probably, he adds, an underestimate.

67. Ibid., 690-94; William Bear, "Flower and Fruit Farming in England," parts 1 and 2, JRASE , 3d series, 9 (1898): 286-316, 512-50, and part 3, JRASE 10 (1899): 267-313; E. A. Pratt, The Transition in Agriculture (London: Murray, 1906), 8-228; Linda Crust, "William Paddison: Marsh Farmer and Survivor of the Agricultural Depression, 1873-96," AHR 43 (1995): 193-204.

68. Fletcher, "Great Depression," 432.

69. E. J. Collins, "Agriculture and Conservation in England: An Historical

Overview, 1880-1939," JRASE 146 (1985): 38, 44-45; Prince, "Victorian Rural Landscapes," 24.

70. Muriel Arbor, "Dust-Storms in the Fenland Round Ely," Geography 31 (1946): 23-26.

71. H. C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens , 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 178.

72. Ibid., 225.

73. Darby, Draining of the Fens , 229-31; the photograph is opposite p. 245.

74. Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Dent, 1986), 379; Michael Weale, ed., Environmental Issues , 3d ed. (Ely: Ely Resources Centre, 1974), 24.

75. Although the definition of marl was never precise, the word was usually applied to clay that had a high calcareous content: see, W. M. Mathew, "Marling in British Agriculture: A Case of Partial Identity," AHR 41 (1993): 97-103.

76. J. A. Clarke, Fen Sketches (1852), 244-45, cited in Darby, Draining of the Fens , 239.

77. Mathew, "Marling in British Agriculture," 106-9.

78. Christabel Orwin and Edith Whetham, History of British Agriculture, 1846-1914 (London: Longmans Green, 1964), 272, 352-53; Grigg, English Agriculture , 203-4.

79. Mathew, "Marling in British Agriculture," 109-10.

80. Arbor, "Dust-Storms in the Fenland," 25-26; A. D. Hall, "The Growth of Sugar Beets," Journal of the Board of Agriculture 11 (1904-5): 577-81; Sidney Rogerson, Both Sides of the Road (London: Collins, 1949), 93-97.

81. Franklin, Good Pastures , 68-70.