The Pros And Cons Of The Agricultural Revolution

The technological advances of the eighteenth century slowly allowed for the advancement of people's lives, economically, but social injustice remained. Three-year rotations were introduced that permitted a year of wheat or rye to be followed by a year of oats or beans and then by a year of fallow harvest. New patterns of organization allowed some farmers to develop increasingly sophisticated patterns of rotation to suit different kinds of soils. Advocates of the new rotations included an emerging group of experimental scientists, some government officials, and landowners, believed that new methods were scarcely possible within the traditional system of open fields and common rights. The new methods of the agricultural revolution originated

The lower class poor people of the time did not like the idea of enclosure because common rights were important to them. The land owning nobles did not want to enforce the idea either because it required large investments. The heavy legal and surveying costs of enclosure were also divided among the people, peasants had paid the cost and landless cottagers lost access to common pastures. By 1700, a highly distinctive pattern of land ownership and production existed in England, where there were few large landowners, at the other extreme were a large mass of landless cottagers who labored mainly for wages, and in between, small, independent peasant farmers who owned their own land and substantial tenant farmers who rented land from landowners, hired laborers, and sold output on market. The tenant farmers, who had formerly been independent owners, were the key to mastering the new methods of farming, because the tenant farmers fenced fields, built drains, and improved the soil with fertilizers, increasing employment opportunities. By eliminating common rights and greatly reducing the access, the enclosure movement marked the completion of two major historical developments in