This sort of thing might go on very comfortably in the sixties, or when only a few hundred acres were farmed for pleasure rather than profit, but when the losses of that awful year 1879 came to be reckoned up and farms which had hitherto been let for fair rents began to come in one after another with heavy bills for acts of husbandry, repairs, purchase of stock, implements, etc., I began to find that the system of farming which I had been brought up to was a very unprofitable business. Anyone who was unlucky enough to have occupied a large area of land in the Midland counties in 1879 must well remember the unequalled disasters of that year, my first year as a farmer. The winter of 1878–79 was bad, the spring worse, and the months which should have been summer but were not, worst of all. Notwithstanding the excessive wet, which lasted until the autumn, there was hardly a turnip as big as an apple on the whole estate, the hay was all spoilt, the corn never ripened, the sheep wasted and died either from fluke or, as a farmer put it to me, they died of hunger with their bellies full because the grass was so watery and in- nutritious from lack of sunshine.
On one of my father’s best farms the tenant had given notice to leave at Michaelmas, 1879, and seeing in the previous winter that he was doing no good to himself and would leave his farm in a fearful mess, I offered to take it over at Lady-day if he would give it up with a valuation based on the actual value of the cultivations and growing crops and not accord- ing to the custom of the country, which allows an outgoing tenant for the estimated cost of the labour done without much regard as to how it was done and what it is worth by results. Luckily for me, however, the tenant declined this, and when his time expired at Old Michaelmas not one single acre of corn was ripe or cut. I told him he could stop on till Lady-day and realise his crops, such as they were, at his leisure. He offered me his sixty acres of wheat standing at £1 an acre, and I declined it because much of it was so blighted and bad that I did not think it would be worth the cost of harvesting and threshing. And so it turned out, for when at Lady-day the wheat was still in rick and I lent him £50 on it, leaving him to thresh it when he liked, it was eventually only fit for pig food and very bad pig food at that.
i remember in November, 1879, though October was the dryest month in the year, seeing foxes found in standing barley. Some of the fields were so bad and the straw so rotten that they were never cut at all, but pigs turned in to get a living as they could. The losses of ewes and lambs were unusually heavy in the following winter, and though we fed almost all the com that was grown on the farm and had a heavy cake bill as well, the cattle and sheep never got over the effects of those two bad winters with not a summer between.
I then saw that I must make radical changes in the old system, and spared neither time, trouble nor expense in learning as much as possible of the details of what I saw was going for some time to be my principal business. I soon realised that on the Cotswold hills, or at any rate on such poor thin land as most of my father’s, a lot of the land could not pay the cost of cultivation on an average of years. I visited the farms of those men who were supposed to have been most successful in laying down land
