ABSTRACT
Harvesting in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was on an unprecedented scale; the tools available in the middle of the nineteenth century and those of subsistence farming. The rural population primarily engaged in agriculture in the middle of the century was still growing despite emigration and migration to urban areas. Low farming, with its reliance on the cultivation of more land through either the enclosing of waste and the breaking of marginal land, or the elimination of fallow in the rotations. Neither produced cheap bread grain under the protective clauses of the Corn Laws, nor a buoyant agriculture which might have ameliorated conditions of employment. To reverse the growing rural stagnation and distress, it needed the persistent advocacy of high farming and the spur of the repeal of the Corn Laws gradually to have its principles of controlling hedges, clearing ditches, land drainage, and the use of organic and inorganic manures adopted.
