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Modern farming is a business in which the farmers operate a business model that combines various inputs to produce the measurable farm output. From this they can estimate profit and loss and profitability, and in the light of such estimates the business model can be adjusted accordingly. This chapter suggests that farmers in the past also practiced according to business methods. The dominant difference is that in the past they were accountable mainly to themselves whereas today they are also accountable to the Inland Revenue, the Ministry, and to the EC. Modern practice generates paperwork, whereas in the past details of farm management and output were collected less systematically and with variable needs to preserve the ensuing records. This chapter discusses the farmers, the kinds of records they generated, and the approximate survival rate of those records. It concludes with a chronological and geographical summary of the records that have been selected and which the authors use to assess farm production in the period.

This chapter tests the traditional appreciation of farming in the past, based on crop rotations of two or three crops followed by a fallow year, against the evidence-based practice of 18th- and 19th-century farmers. Not only was farming more complex than this, but it also changed and therefore evolved according to farmers' assessments of the market and the diffusion of new crops and techniques. Through measurements derived from farmers' records, the magnitude of this evolution is measured and in particular the temporal diffusion of the Norfolk four course systems of new crops based on the nitrogen cycle is assessed. At the same time, there was a revolution taking place in soil improvements through soil conditioning and fertilizing, and these are also measured and assessed.

This introductory chapter establishes the key questions in English agricultural history about the timing of the agricultural revolution and its relationship with the associated industrial and demographic revolutions. It also reviews the major literature on the subject from the contemporary observers of agricultural change, like Arthur Young, to the 19th-century attempts to measure agricultural output. Traditionally the relationships between agriculture, industry, and population change have been studied at aggregate levels, based on assumptions and employing plausible but nonetheless estimates of the levels of output and production. The new approach in this book suggests that the key might lie in a study of the farm records and the farmers themselves, which will allow some real measures rather than plausible estimates to emerge.