History

Robert Bakewell was an 18th

century English agriculturalist who
introduced stockbreeding methods that
transformed the quality of Britain's cattle,
horses and sheep. He was born near
Loughborough in Leicestershire. Born to
a family of tenant farmers (is people
whom resides on land owned by a landlord).He was much of an explorer as he traveled
he learnt a diverse range of farming methods. He was an apprentice under his father’s
guidance until one day on a saddening time for Robert his father past away in 1760. That
was the time he could put all his skills on farming. Selective Breeding though not one of
his inventions he was more famous for being the 1st to ever make a commercial success
of the procedure. The idea was to take the largest and strongest animals to mate. That is
why nowadays pigs etc. are kept to their same gender unlike in the olden days. For
example his new Leicester sheep, it produce relatively very high amount of meat but
apart from that was really fat.

Jethro Tull was an 18th century English

agriculturalist who introduced the seed drill that
transformed the method of Britain’s method of sowing
seeds effectively. He was born in Basildon, Berkshire, to
Jethro Tull, Sr. and Dorothy Buckridge, and baptised
there on 30 March 1674.] He grew up in Bradfield,
Berkshire and matriculated at St John's College,
Oxford at the age of 17, but appears not to have taken a degree. He was later educated
at Gray's Inn. He married Susannah Smith of Burton Dassett, Warwickshire. They settled
on his father's farm at Howbery where they were joined by a son and four daughters.
Jethro Tull improved the seed drill, a device for sowing seeds effectively. At the time his
workers did not like the idea because they thought they were going to lose their jobs.
Originally the method that was soon replaced by the seed drill was just throwing seeds
onto the field by hand which firstly took a lot of time and wasted most of the seeds.

The size of agricultural allotments in Europe gradually increased beginning in the

fifteenth century, allowing farmers more space to experiment with different crop rotation
schedules. By 1800, many European farmers had adopted a four-year rotation cycle
developed in Holland and introduced in Great Britain by Viscount Charles "Turnip"
Townshend in the mid-1700s. The four-field system rotated wheat, barley, a root crop like
turnips, and a nitrogen-fixing crop like clover. Livestock grazed directly on the clover, and
consumed the root crop in the field. In the new system, fields were always planted with
either food or feed, increasing both grain yields and livestock productivity. Furthermore,
adding a nitrogen-fixing crop and allowing manure to accumulate directly on the fields
improved soil fertility; eliminating a fallow period insured that the land was protected from
soil erosion by stabilizing vegetation throughout the cycle.

By: Corinne Ashley Noronha 8S