AGRICULTURE 



IN giving an account of a single county, it may occur that those 

 writing for other districts more or less distant and of similar character 

 may describe the corresponding practices here related. If it should 

 be so, it need not, and probably will not, detract from the value 

 of either work. The following account, relating to the last forty or fifty 

 years, is mainly from the experience or observation of the writer. The earlier 

 history and subsequent development of Suffolk agriculture must necessarily be 

 derived from other writers, or from personal acquaintance with those whose 

 memory reached into the far past. 



Materials for this are not wanting. For the description of the agriculture 

 of Suffolk we have that of Arthur Young, compiled for the Board of Agricul- 

 ture in 1797 ; Hugh Rainbird's essay in the "Journal of the Royal Agricultural 

 Society of England written in 1849 ; a contribution to White's Suffolk 

 Directory in 1884 ; and, later still, that excellent account of Suffolk farming 

 from the pen of Mr. Rider Haggard. The last relates to the present time ; 

 from the other three sources may be traced the gradual advance in practice 

 during the entire period of the nineteenth century. These works were placed 

 before the public at the time they were written ; those out of print may 

 occasionally be met with on the second-hand bookstall ; but the writer of 

 these pages has access to the labour books, memoranda, experiments, and 

 observations of an ancestor who commenced farming under the Marquess of 

 Bristol in the year 1808. He lived at Playford, near Ipswich, and died there 

 in 1860. Volume after volume of his farm accounts are still extant, and if, 

 in future years, they should be dealt with by an expert, they will form a 

 source of information on local agriculture second to none of the works, 

 named. There is yet another mine of wealth for the historian of this 

 county in the 140 volumes of a weekly county paper started about 1820, 

 now deposited in the reference library of the Ipswich Museum. 



Want of space forbids any copious extracts being made use of from the 

 sources mentioned. Arthur Young's books have been read, quoted, and 

 forgotten by generation after generation. His account of Suffolk forms art 

 octavo volume of some 300 pages, and if it is not exhaustive it is at least 

 comprehensive, for he seems to have omitted nothing. In looking back to 

 the time in which he lived, one thing strikes the reader, and that is the feeble 

 powers of food-production compared with the enormous capabilities of the land 

 as now cultivated. This is more apparent when estimated by money value, 

 and the slow returns with which the farmers in those days were satisfied. 

 This view is confirmed by the description of what was done on the land a 

 hundred years back as related to the writer fifty years ago by men who were 

 living at that date. Especially is this the case with regard to meat. 



Within sight of the writer's home is a fine mixed soil holding 

 occupied by one of our leading stock farmers. The machine-like regularity 

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