ABSTRACT
The monthly agricultural reports published in the Waterford Mirror (1819–42) and Belfast’s Northern Whig (1824–42) are described, then used to derive qualitative indicators of harvest outcomes in pre-famine Ireland. Contemporary descriptions of the wheat, oats, barley, potatoes, flax, and hay harvests were scaled in order to analyze their covariations. The wheat, potato and hay crops tended to show similar fluctuations in the two regions; outcomes of the barley and oats harvests were not systematically related. Among crops within the same region covariation was much less pronounced than across regions, except for the inverse relationship between the wheat and hay crops in the south-east and for a tendency for the oats and potato crops to move together in the north-east and inversely in the south-east. The results suggest that mixed farming should have helped to stabilize farm incomes; that the potato may have been better suited to the south-east than the north-east; and that it may have been less unreliable than has often been argued.
