The Agricultural Revolution

Southland Times, Issue 9973, 22 September 1888, Page 4

The Agricultural Revolution

___ _♦_ Sir Igo* Playfair,, in an address on Fiscal Changes, at Leeds, gave a scientific man's views as to the chief couses of agricultural depression ia England. This depression xnnst be continuous and. permanent while other countries l*aye wiieat and other produce to import nnderJpifeting conditions 'If our landlords and farmers want to Jtnow the names of the three persons who have knocked j oat the bottom Of our old agricultural system I can tell them. Their names are Wheat■tone, Sir Henry Bessemer, and Dr. Joule, The first, by telegraphy, has changed the whole system by which exchanges are made; the second, by his improvements in steel, has altered profoundly the transportation of commodities by sea and by land : and the third, by his discoveries of the mechanical equivalent |of heat, has led to great economy of coal in compound engines. By those changes the United States, Canada, India and Russia have their corn crops brought to axu doors. The effect of these discoveries upon the transport of com will be realised when I state that a small cake of coal which would pass through a ring the size of a shilling, when burned in the compound engine of a modern steamboat, would drive a ton of food and its proportion of the ship two miles on its way from a foreign port. This "economy of coal has altered the whole situation. Not long since a steamer of 3000 tons, going on a long voyage, might require 2200 tons of coal and carry only a limited cargo of 800 tons. Now, a modern steamer will take the same voyage with |800 tons of coal, and carry a freight of 2200 tons. While coal has been thus economised, human labour has been leisened. In 1870 it required 47 hands on board our steamships for every 1000 tons capacity, now only 28 are necessary, All these changes going on in the economy of fuel and of labour have led to increased produotion at a small cost, Three men in the United States working for one year in the growth, milling, and transportation of wheat can produce flour for a year's consumption of a thousand men, allowing one barrel of flour to each adult. I need not elaborate this point further, for you will all see how this has acted upon agriculture. It has made the grain market one all over the world. Formerly we looked to the United States alone to supply any deficiency in our crops, but now the transport of grain from Bombay to England by the Suez Canal has been reduced, between 1880, and 1885, from Is 4d to 8d a bushel.'