Hop Cultivation . 259 
the factor’s commission, and the brewers have not to pay for 
merchant’s profits. 
A certain part of the Hampshire and Surrey hop crop is sold 
at Weyhill fair in October. 1 The rest is sent to London. In 
Herefordshire and Worcestershire many planters take their hops 
to Worcester, where there is a hop market, and the hops are 
sold to merchants and brewers, and weighed at the public 
scales. 
THe Cost of Hop Production. 
The cost of hop production has greatly increased within the 
last thirty years, on account of the enhanced price of skilled 
labour, the necessity of employing expensive methods to combat 
the attacks of insects and fungi, and the generally improved 
style of farming which has been rendered imperative in con- 
sequence of the competition of foreign countries. 
It costs from 201. to 25 1. to plant and establish an acre of 
hop land, including manure, ploughing, subsoiling, setting-out, 
planting, purchase of sets, cultivating, rent, rates, &c. Some- 
times sets cost 10s. per hundred, which would be equal to 
12 1. 10s. per acre for sets alone, but their average price is 5s., 
or 61. 5s. per acre for a six-feet square plant. Lance, in his 
Hop Farmer, put the cost of planting an acre of hop land at 18/., 
in 1838. Mr. Buckland estimated this at 22/. 15s. per acre in 
1845, 2 including draining. 
To this first cost must be added the amount for equipping 
the hop land with proper poles required at the end of the first 
year. This, as shown before, ranges between 20/. and 40/. per 
acre, according to the sizes of the poles. 
Hop land costs close upon 35/. per acre annually, taking an 
average of the whole of the districts. On highly-farmed hop 
land in East and Mid Kent the cost per acre often amounts to 
40/. per acre. The average cost, put at 35/., is made up of 
the items set forth in the table on p. 260. 
In 1798 Mr. Marshall put the yearly expense of hop land in 
Kent at 22/. per acre, exclusive of all charges connected with 
picking, packing and selling, which he estimated at 1/. per cwt. 3 
Mr. Mainwaring reckoned that the total cost of producing 
8 cwt. of hops per acre in Worcestershire was 24/. in 1855, 4 
1 A percentage of pockets representing each growth is “pitched” at Wey- 
hill fair in barns. 
2 On the Farming of Kent. By George Buckland. Journal of the Royal 
Agricultural Society, vol. vi., 1st series, p. 287. 
3 Rural Economy of the Southern Counties. By Mr. Marshall, 1798. 
4 A Treatise on Hops. By T, Mainwaring, Worcester, 1856. 
