Some Farming Techniques and Practices

Farming – growing your food instead of getting it entirely from wild plants and animals – is believed to have spread across Europe from a starting-point in the Near East, having been brought to this country 5 or 6 millennia ago by Neolithic settlers from the Continent. Early primitive techniques have been continually refined and improved as successive immigrant populations arrived, with new and more up-to-date ideas.

(a) Tools and machines for arable farming.

The first primitive tool for cultivating the soil was a digging stick. The first plough did little more than scratch the surface of the soil. It could only be used on light lands, and to get a satisfactory tilth the small squarish ‘Celtic’ fields had to be cross-ploughed. A heavier plough which could cut the sod and turn a furrow was introduced to more sophisticated parts of the country by Iron Age Belgae, but did not reach Dorset until the Roman occupation. This remained the basic type of plough in use throughout the Middle Ages and right up to modern times. Drawing it by horse is a comparatively recent development; Stevenson’s 1812 report to the Board of Agriculture recorded that “Mr. Wood, of Osmington, works oxen, four to a plough”. Seed corn was broadcast by hand until Tull invented the seed drill in the 18th century. Corn could then be sown in rows, and cultivated by a horse-drawn hoe. With the industrial revolution came the introduction of steam power, first for threshing machines and then for ploughs. The Dorset County Chronicle reported in 1870 that Henry Duke had acquired a steam-plough set (“with more pluck than prudence,” remarked a fellow-farmer), and in the same year Eddison’s new Steam Plough Works at Fordington carried out its first contract for steam-ploughing on a Dorset farm. This development did not catch on however: it was costly, it meant carting coal and water to the machines, and a long period of agricultural depression was looming. Eddison’s Works took up provision of steam-rollers for roads, instead.

(b)Manures and fertilizers

Before the days of artificial fertilizers, the farmer had to rely almost entirely on dung from his livestock to keep his arable land fertile. For centuries, folding of sheep on arable fields lying fallow was an essential factor in Dorset farming, with occasional supplements from whatever else might come to hand locally: e.g. pigeon droppings, decaying fish. Defoe told how in the 1720’s guards were posted on the shore near Bridport during shore-fishing, “to prevent the country farmers buying the mackerell to dung their land with them, which was thought to be dangerous, as to infection”. In the 19th century, bones and guano came into use as fertilizers. The first shipment of nitrate of soda arrived from Chile in 1832, and the manufacture of superphosphates began a few years later. These new-fangled substances were accepted slowly and suspiciously, and it was very many years before artificial fertilizers became an accepted part of farming practice.

(c)Water-meadows

Dorset took a leading part in the use of the water-meadows constructed in the 17th and 18th centuries. In his 1793 report on agriculture in Dorset, Claridge said “The proportion of water meadows is nowhere so great, or any where better managed; the early vegetation produced by flooding, is of such consequence to the Dorsetshire farmer that, without it, their present system of managing sheep would be almost annihilated.” Stevenson’s 1812 report quoted a very precise description of how the meadows were managed by Mr. G. Boswell of Piddlehinton. Their operation started, he said, before Christmas and produced enough food for ewes and lambs from mid-March to the first or second week in May. The meadows were then watered again, a week at a time, and by the beginning of July were ready for mowing, giving one and a half to two and a half tons to the acre. They were then watered again, for two or three days at a time, until September. The typical basic structure of water meadows, the channels, the ridges and means of drainage, can still be seen in the fields off Knighton lane where Broadmayne’s water meadows used to lie.

Organisation
Sheep
Economic ups & downs