Robert Bakewell And The Agricultural Revolution

“The agricultural revolution transformed the earth and changed the fate of humanity. It produced an entirely new mode of subsistence, which remains the foundation of the global economy to this day.”, quote by Robyn Davidson. Although it only changed the lives of a few million people across the entirety of Britain at the time of the agricultural revolution, it helped in the making of a better world today in our modern society and many innovations created during the 18th century are still in use today on our farms. "Our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those Neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one
Robert Bakewell (1725 – 1795), was the first and most prominent stock breeder of farm animals. By breeding only animals with certain qualities, he could breed much more livestock. He kept records of his valuable animals and maintained his stock carefully. He was famous for his success with sheep and by the end of the eighteenth century, his principles of selective breeding were used widely across Europe. This lead to the making of a better world as this allowed farmers to be able to keep more livestock and not have to slaughter as many during winter as the health and size of livestock increased. It has been scientifically proven that during this time, the size of cattle more than doubled, and the size of sheep more than tripled between 1710 and 1795! This was another one of many changes made during the agricultural revolution. Another change included the creation of many new inventions that revolutionised the way we live
Some of the most popular and well known inventions included the seed drill, horse hoe, reaper and twine knotters. Jethro Tull’s (1674 – 1741) major contributions to the Agricultural Revolution was his two inventions, the seed drill and the horse hoe. The seed drill was an invention that allowed seeds to be easily planted deep into the ground, instead of top where many seeds were washed away or lost. This machine was pulled by horses and runners (people) that would plant seeds at a set depth. His other invention as the horse hoe. This was another revolutionary device which allowed for more efficient planting by allowing a horse to pull a plow quickly. Another invention was the reaper/binder. Before this invention small grains had been cut with sickles or scythes, hand-racked and tied into sheaves. Obed Hussey and Cyrus McCormick developed two very successful reapers during the 1830’s, although Cyrus’s machine became the more popular one. And surprisingly, today he is credited with inventing the paper. These early inventions still required the sheaves to be bound by hand, but in 1857 the Marsh brothers equipped a reappear with a moving canvas that carried the grain to a platform where it was tied into bundles by a worker riding on the machine. The first twine knotter was demonstrated in 1867 by John Appleby. A few years later, Sylvanus Locke