Improving the Farm or Practicing Sustainable Agriculture?

I’d been to the Clay estate in Ashland, now part of Lexington, Kentucky, many times before.  Its grounds, with their towering trees, make a lovely place to walk.

Trees shading the back of the Clay house at Ashland Park, Lexington, Kentucky

Last week, though, I paid more attention to the signs posted about the estate. One of them quoted a letter that Henry Clay, American statesman and several times near-miss for President, wrote in 1806 explaining that he was propagating spruce on the “little farm I am improving.”

Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate in Lexington, Kentucky. This is not the original house built for Clay in the first decade of the nineteenth century but a replacement in the 1860s that followed the original ground plan. Wikimedia

Improving.

Suddenly the two sides of the Atlantic were united and my own history slotted neatly in. Improving was what landowners on both sides of the Atlantic were busy doing from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth.  I was raised in a house built in the improving age, not as grand as Henry Clay’s or the one shown below, but a substantial stone building nonetheless, with attendant and impressive stone farm buildings in two separate yards.

Street House Farm, Yorkshire, one of a series of new farms built in the 1760s by the Earl of Holdernesse. From John Martin Robinson, Georgian Model Farms (Clarendon Press, 1983).

What was improvement?  Well, in Britain it was a whole series of strategies to make what nature had provided better. These included:

• clearing stones
• draining whole areas or inserting ceramic drainpipes in parts of fields that tended to be wet
• building elaborate systems of weirs, little canals, and locks to flood land to warm it up so grass grew earlier in the spring (water meadows is the technical term)
• adding calcium-carbonate-rich earth to lighten clay soils (marling)
• introducing new crops, including turnips and other roots for feeding cattle during the winter, and clover
• Introducing new trees, shrubs, etc
• breeding new varieties of farm animals, particularly sheep and cattle
• inventing better ploughs and more efficient ways of threshing
• building new farm buildings, including better-designed barns, threshing floors, barns, poultry houses, pigeon houses, ice houses, smoke houses, stables, and the like
• spreading manure as a fertilizer
• building better dwellings for farm workers and substantial houses for the farmers, like the one shown above

And since the land remained the chief source of wealth, landowners and farmers were alert to the possibility of finding mineral wealth, including coal, limestone, and clay for bricks, to building lime kilns, and to encouraging the construction of canals close to or across their land to get their goods to market.

Books on farming multiplied, pattern books of designs for farms and farm buildings were widely distributed, and the Board of Agriculture published reports on the farming in all the different counties in England between 1793 and 1822. Agricultural societies and shows were established. New professions of land agent and mineral surveyor appeared.

There were costs, of course, there were winners and losers, particularly among the rural poor, as I’ve hinted in other posts, and which historians have unpacked in detail.

But at a period when everyone feared the periodic scarcity of food and when population was growing, the increase in agricultural productivity to the highest in Europe staved off hunger and revolution. Retrospectively, the collective results of this determined improvement are known as the Agricultural Revolution.

Moreover Improvement was a much broader enterprise than productivity and profit.  The houses and farm buildings were to be attractive.  The landscape was to be beautiful, the plantings chosen for their beauty as well as their utility. And the land was to provide recreation in the form rural sports, hunting, shooting, and fishing in Britain, with rivers stocked with fish, and cover created for game.

So I think it is useful to see the Clay estate (and the estates of Jefferson and Washington in Clay’s home state of Virginia) in light of the English commitment to improvement, just as Cynthia Bertelsen stresses the roots of American cooking in the English tradition.

Today in the United States, venture capitalists again see investment in agriculture as worthy.  And many hope to promote “sustainable” agriculture, arguing that they want not just profit but other goods such as preservation of the landscape and of ways of life.

I have to admit to preferring the language of improvement to the language of sustainability.  Improvement is upbeat and optimistic. It lends itself to the setting of goals and to the measuring of progress toward those goals.

Sustainability, on the other hand, is defensive, a matter of conservation, preservation, and maintaining the status quo.  And since no one has a clue what sustainable practices are ( because they can’t be simply equated with organic, small-scale or other popular surrogates), it’s impossible to know whether progress is being made or not.

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