Great Depression of British Agriculture

The Great Depression of British Agriculture occurred during the late nineteenth century and is usually dated from 1873 to 1896. The depression was caused by the dramatic fall in grain prices following the opening up of the American prairies to cultivation in the 1870s and the advent of cheap transportation with the rise of steamships. British agriculture did not recover from this depression until after the Second World War.

In 1846 Parliament repealed the Corn Laws—which had imposed a tariff on imported grain—and thereby instituted free trade. There was a widespread belief that free trade would lower prices immediately. However this did not occur for about 25 years after repeal and the years 1853 to 1862 were famously described by Lord Ernle as the "golden age of English agriculture". This period of prosperity was caused by rising prices due to the discovery of gold in Australia and California which encouraged industrial demand. Grain prices dropped from 1848 to 1850 but went up again from 1853, with the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the American Civil War (1861-1865) preventing the export of cereals from Russia and America, thereby shielding Britain from the effects of free trade. Britain enjoyed a series of good harvests (apart from in 1860) and the area of land under cultivation expanded, with increasing land values and increasing investments in drainage and buildings. In the opinion of historian Robert Ensor, the technology employed in British agriculture was superior to most farming on the Continent due to more than a century of practical research and experimentation: "Its breeds were the best, its cropping the most scientific, its yields the highest". Ernle stated that "crops reached limits which production has never since exceeded, and probably, so far as anything certain can be predicted of the unknown, never will exceed".

In 1862 the United States Congress passed the Homestead Act which led to the settlement of a large part of the Midwest. America also witnessed a great increase in railways, mainly across the prairies. In 1860 America possessed about 30,800 miles of railways; by 1880 this had increased to about 94,200 miles. The railway companies encouraged farmer-settlers by promising to transport their crops for less than cost for a number of years. Due to the technological progress of shipping, there was for the first time plenty of cheap steam ships to transport their crops across the seas. This drove down transport costs: in 1873 the cost of transporting a ton of grain from Chicago to Liverpool was £3 7s., in 1880 it was £2 1s. and in 1884 £1 4s. New inventions in agricultural machinery also aided the American prairie farmer. Due to the scarcity of hired farm labourers, prairie farmers had to collect their own harvest and the limit of their expansion was set by what one pair of hands could do. The advent of the reaper-binder in 1873 revolutionised harvesting because it meant the doubling of every farmer's crop as it enabled the reaping to be worked by one man instead of two. For these reasons, cheap imports of vast amounts of American prairie wheat were able to flood the market and undercut and overwhelm British wheat farmers.

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