The Industrial Revolution was preceded by the Agricultural and made the industrial revolution possible. The Agricultural revolution started in the 18th and early 19th century. " The main changes comprised crop rotation, new machinery, increased capital investment, scientific breeding, land reclamation and enclosure of common lands. Originating in Britain, these advances led to greatly increased agricultural productivity in Europe

Here are some changes that happened in the Agricultural Rev:

Crop rotation in the Agricultural Rev.

Growing the same crop repeatedly on the same land eventually depletes the soil of different nutrients. Farmers avoided a decrease in soil fertility by practicing crop rotation. Different plant crops were planted in a regular sequence so that the leaching of the soil by a crop of one kind of nutrient was followed by a plant crop that returned that nutrient to the soil British agriculturalist Charles Townshend aided the European agricultural revolution by popularizing a four- year crop rotation with rotations of wheat,barley, turnips, and clover..(http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfarm.htm) The farmer that was famous for crop rotation was Carles Townshend.  He encouraged new crop rotation.

 Townshend carried on many agricultural experiments at Raynham, and for these he became known as Turnip Townshend.

Selective Breeding

"In England, Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced selective breeding (mating together two animals with particularly desirable characteristics), and inbreeding to reduce genetic diversity in desirable animals programs from the mid 18th century as methods for producing bigger and more profitable livestock. This led to the change of the favourite type of meat to mutton^"(

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revoluti}

 MUTTON

Effects on History

The British Agricultural Revolution was the cause of drastic changes in the lives of British women. Before the Agricultural Revolution, women worked alongside their husbands in the fields and were an active part of farming. The increased efficiency of the new machinery, along with the fact that this new machinery was often heavier and difficult for a woman to wield, made this unnecessary and impractical, and women were relegated to other roles in society. To supplement the family's income, many went into cottage industries. Others became domestic servants or were forced into professions such as prostitution. The new, limited roles of women, dubbed by one historian as "this defamation of women workers", (Valenze) fueled prejudices of women only being fit to work in the home, and also effectively separated them from the new, mechanized areas of work, leading to a divide in the pay between men and women.

The increase in population led to more demand from the people for goods such as clothing. A new class of landless labourers, products of enclosure, provided the basis for cottage industry, a stepping stone to the Industrial Revolution. To supply continually growing demand, shrewd businessmen began to pioneer new technology to meet demand from the people. This led to the first industrial factories. People who once were farmers moved to large cities to get jobs in the factories. It should be noted that the British Agricultural Revolution not only made the population increase possible, but also increased the yield per agricultural worker, meaning that a larger percentage of the population could work in these new, post-Agricultural Revolution jobs.

Beginning as early as the 12th century, some of the common fields in Britain were enclosed into individually owned fields, and the process rapidly accelerated in the 15th and 16th century as sheep farming grew more profitable. This led to farmers losing their land and their grazing rights, and left many unemployed.

Mechanizaton

Jethro Tull made the first advancements in agricultural technology with his seed drill (1701)—a mechanical seeder which distributed seeds efficiently across a plot of land. However, he was not the first to invent a seed drill and it took a while to catch on because he was eccentric. It took a century after the publication in 1731 of his Horse hoeing husbandry for farmers to widely adopt the technology. SEED DRILL

Andrew Meikle's threshing machine of 1786 was the final straw for many farm labourers, and led to the 1830 agricultural rebellion of Captain Swing (a mythical character comparable to the Luddite's Ned Ludd).

THRESHING MACHINE

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