The words farming and Lincolnshire are synonymous even to people who have never visited our county. Over a quarter of the nation's vegetables are grown here in addition to cereals sugar beet and bulbs and flowers. Farming has shaped our landscape and our population and may truly be said to be Lincolnshire's Heritage.
Importance of Agriculture
The importance of agriculture in Lincolnshire goes back to the very start of farming, in prehistoric times. Sometime around 3,500 BC techniques of growing certain types of plants useful for food, and of domesticating animals were found to be more efficient ways of survival than by hunting and gathering alone.
With the development of farming, societies began to settle down in one place rather than being nomadic and thus village life was born. Evidence for these early farmers has been found in the south of the county at archaeological excavations at West Deeping and Market Deeping. Patterns of fields were discovered, with droveways for moving sheep and cattle, each droveway leading to a stock yard. These particular farms seem to have been in use from around 1500BC to 500 BC.
By the time of the Roman invasion, agriculture was well enough established in Britain for the classical writers to note that Britain was exporting grain and cattle to the continent - indeed, this was one of the factors behind the Roman takeover. Agricultural practises improved under Roman rule with large villa farms cultivating hundreds of acres alongside small native holdings involved in subsistence farming. An important industry at this time (and for centuries to come) was saltmaking - this was carried out on a small scale alongside more regular farming activities - an early example of diversification.
After the Romans
The large scale farming on the villa estates seems to have ceased when the Romans left Britain in the 5th century. As far as we can tell (for there is much yet to be discovered in these little-known centuries) Anglo Saxon settlement developed the pattern of villages and fields that is still the basis of our upland landscape today. By the time of the great Domesday Survey in 1086 there is a diverse picture of villages settlement with ploughland, meadow, woodland, saltpans and watermills.
Farming in the medieval period was largely a co-operative operation and at certain times of the year the whole village would get together in order to get the work done. This was particularly true of the initial clearance of land in order to create new arable fields, but ploughing and harvest were also times of great joint effort. The land was owned by the lord of the manor and each peasant would rent a series of strips in the arable fields and have common rights of pasture in the meadows. These arable strips are still visible in our landscape today and we call them rig and furrow, although modern farming is slowly but surely flattening out these remnants of the past.
Into the Middle Ages
Farming practises continue largely unchanged through the middle ages, the big change being that of land use ... the lords and landowners often decide that sheep-farming will be more profitable than letting the land to the peasants for arable use and thus whole estates are enclosed and set to pasture. The effect on the peasants is devastating - without arable land they cannot survive so they moved away and whole villages were deserted - Lincolnshire has hundreds of these lost villages now only detectable as humps and bumps where once there were streets and houses.
18th and 19th Centuries
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bring enormous changes and improvements in farming and Lincolnshire was regarded as being in the forefront of agricultural progress. The drainage of low lying land in our Fens and marshes opened up some of the richest soils in the country to arable farming. Developments in fertilisers, field drainage and crop rotation improved yields (and profits) and mechanisation reduced the enormous input of labour that had been required. Steam tractors were introduced in the mid 1800s and Lincolnshire became one of the foremost producers of agricultural machinery in the nation.
Names such as Clayton and Shuttleworth, Fosters, Hornsby, Marshall, Robeys and Rustons became world famous as their tractors and machinery spread across the globe and Lincolnshire towns became engineering centres with great factories springing up alongside the terraced rows of houses of the factory workers - for a while agriculture and engineering compete for labour in late 19th and early 20th century Lincolnshire. It is our expertise in tractor engineering that leads to Lincolnshire's development of the tank during the Great War.
Adaptation in the 20th century and Beyond
Like all industries, agriculture has to adapt in order to survive and the county's farming industry has seen enormous changes take place in the latter half of the 20th century. Between 1901 and 1975 agricultural production increased fivefold in the county and yet employment within the farming industry has fallen by over 60%. Land-use has also changed markedly - the mixed arable and pastoral farming that typified the Lincolnshire landscape at the start of the 20th century has changed to a largely arable economy. This change was accelerated by the second world war "Dig for Victory" campaign which brought 2000 town girls into Lincolnshire farms as part of the Women's Land Army and also employed 1800 prisoners of war.
Farming in Lincolnshire today is going through a tough time as changes in EU support and the dominance of supermarkets in the retail food market squeeze profit margins to the limit and beyond. Mixed farming has virtually disappeared as specialisation is the only way to survive - this trend is reflected in our landscape and there is less and less pasture and fewer sheep and cattle to be seen in our countryside. Just as the prehistoric and Roman farmers diversified in order to survive, so too do the farms of today and an ever increasing range of supplementary activities is being developed from holiday homes and fishing lakes to paint gun battlegrounds and wildlife walks.
Lincolnshire's rich agricultural heritage was celebrated for 2004's Heritage Open Days. As part of that celebration, a booklet has been published by the Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire, which charts the development and change of the county's farming landscape. Entitled "Farming in Lincolnshire 3000BC to 2000AD" it is available at all good bookshops, price £4.95 or direct from the Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire.
Dave Start
Director, Heritage Lincolnshire
