Herefordshire Through Time
Herefordshire Through Time
(Information taken from Guy M Robinson, "Agricultural Depression, 1870 to 1900" in Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club, Vol. XLII Part III, 1978, pp. 259-278)
The main feature of agrarian change in the last quarter of the 19th century was the decreasing profitability of arable farming. Cereals, and especially wheat, suffered from marked price falls and, although oats became more competitive and increased their acreage in the 1890s, overall pasture expanded at the expense of arable.
Certain areas of livestock farming also suffered from declining prices, notably the production of sheep for wool. However, in terms of expansion dairy farming benefited from changing market preferences. The price of both mutton and beef fell from a peak in the early 1880s and there were reports of a depression.
The vale around Hereford has no definitive spatial limits, but can broadly be taken to be the land below 55ft in the valleys of the Wye and the Lugg. It is an undulating area surrounded by an irregular and broken ring of hills whose fringes mark its borders. These hills include the Woolhope Dome, Aconbury Hill, Vowchurch Common, Brinsop Camp and Dinmore Hill. The Wye flows west to east across the centre of the vale and is joined by the southward flowing Lugg 3¼ miles south-east of Hereford. The soil in the vale is mostly made up of Lower Old Red Sandstone and has a distinctive red colouring. The soils are largely silty, providing good pasture and corn crops as well as being ideal for hops and cider apples.
In the 1870s farming and agriculture was the main source of income for the majority of the population, with Hereford being the major source of alternative employment. The city had a total of 16,851 inhabitants in 1871 and functioned primarily as a market centre. The coming of the railways at the beginning of the 1850s had stimulated the development of flour and saw-mills, increased cider production and led to the opening of the Corn Exchange in 1858 and a new Butter Market in 1863.
Herefordshire had been well known for centuries as a rearing county from which cattle were taken to fattening pastures in the midlands and south-east. In 1800 Prince's map of land use, based on the General Views of the Board of Agriculture and Capper's statistical account, shows the county as having three-fifths of its agricultural land under arable use.
In the Vale of Hereford the majority of holdings were under 50 acres, with the smallest farms around Hereford. Holdings in the 100-300 acres range were more common on the fringes of the vale.
The rich pastures of the vale provided the fattening grounds for the well-known red and white Hereford breed of cattle. The typical Hereford beast was not favoured by especially high quality meat and as a beef breed its milk yield was not good. However, it possessed the fullest combination of early maturity and fattening qualities with a robust constitution. The Herefords were a hardy breed that could generally be kept out of doors throughout the year and fattened largely on grass.
Probably the best known aspect of the economy of the Vale of Hereford is cattle rearing.
Throughout the last quarter of the 19th century there was a strong correlation between permanent pasture and cattle, with grassland representing the main feed for cattle. Cattle of two years and over were fewer in number than younger beasts.
At the start of the 19th century the Hereford breed was usually worked at the plough for five or six years before being sold for fattening. The need for farmers to realise more capital between the 1820s and 1830s reduced this period to four years, whilst competition from the Shorthorn reduced it further to 2½ years.
The increased demand for milk in the last quarter of the 19th century led to an increase in the size of dairy herds and a concomitant growth in the Shorthorn dairy herds, plus the rise to greater prominence of Ayrshires and the Channel Islands breeds. As has already been mentioned Herefords were not a good milk-producing breed and several farmers in the vale began to stock their dairies with cows from a specific dairy breed such as Jerseys, Guernseys or Ayrshires.
In the 1870s the ratio of dairy cattle to other cattle was 1:1.82, with milk for Hereford being produced in the vale. The greatest densities were in the Lugg Valley, especially where it meets the Wye with the pasture here being especially good. Over the last quarter of the 19th century the numbers of "other cattle" rose from 11.90 per 100 acres of agricultural land to 14.89, which followed the national trend.
The movement towards the general pattern of fattening at two years of age or earlier progressed through the late Victorian period. The majority of cattle ready for fattening were sent by rail to the midland fattening grounds, but Herefordshire was not an exclusively cattle-rearing county. On several farms cattle were brought in from Wales, fattened and then sold on. Whilst the numbers of dairy cattle in the vale increased during the late Victorian period and some fattening of cattle was also undertaken, store stock remained the mainstay of the economy.
While cereal prices fell dramatically from the mid-1870s, the prices of store cattle remained favourable until the 1880s. Then they fell by a third between 1883 and 1885. In the same period meat imports rose by 50%. Beef prices also fell from the mid-1880s, and the feeders' margins were quite severely squeezed. Those farms which made the majority of their income from store animals were not so badly affected. Their most difficult times came in the early 1890s when price falls were more severe and drought affected the pastures.
Two aspects of the farming system in the vale were not common to the majority of pastoral farming enterprises in western Britain. Whilst cider apple production was practised in Devon and Somerset, it was not associated with hops as it was in Herefordshire. These two enterprises provided an alternative form of income which could be of special value in times of hardship.
By the 1860s the acreage of hops in Worcestershire and Herefordshire represented one tenth of the national total, but the district had the advantage of producing higher-quality hops than the majority of those grown in the south-east.
In the 1860s hop growers received a boost through the removal of excise duty on hops and this, coupled with a rapid expansion of the brewing industry, produced a sharp rise in acreage. The national figure reached a maximum of nearly 72,000 acres in 1878, whilst the acreage in Herefordshire rose from 4,500 acres in 1850 to 6,000 in 1878. From this peak, a combination of foreign competition, technical changes in brewing and rising productivity in the hop industry produced a national acreage decline.
However the hopyards of the West Midlands did not follow the national pattern and their acreage remained stable. In the Vale of Hereford there was actually a small increase in the hop acreage recorded in the Agricultural Returns from 1186 acres in 1875-9 to 1491 in 1895-9. In Herefordshire there was a marked concentration of hop growing in the Lugg and Frome Valleys at the turn of the 20th century.
Both apple trees and hops thrived on the deep alluvial soils of the Lugg valley, which also produced good yields of beans. Although the soil was a favourable element, at a time when the national hop acreage was in decline Herefordshire benefited from its concentration upon good quality hops such as the Fuggle variety. Thus, despite a decrease in the amount of hops used in brewing in the 1880s by about 1lb per standard barrel of beer, good-quality hops were still in demand. This remained the case despite an increase in the importation of foreign hops, which were used for blending purposes.
This reflected a change in public demand, which also saw a decline in the amount of cider drunk in Britain. The orchard acreage in the vale, however, remained static over the last 25 years of the century, occupying 7.73% of the agricultural area in 1875-9 compared to 7.30% in 1895-9. There was an acreage increase in the late 1850s and 1860s in response to the coming of the railways and the adoption of the quicker Devonshire method of crushing apples for their juice. But as cider consumption failed to increase in the 1870s and 1880s only the larger growers produced commercially. Production for domestic consumption continued, and even in 1900 labourers were receiving two to three quarts of cider daily in addition to their wages.
There was an increase in the consumption of both fruit and vegetables in the late Victorian period, and some of the vale's apples went for sale in the South Wales and Birmingham markets. This helped to maintain the acreage at the 1870s level and, in addition, as cereal - and later livestock - prices fell, the need to rely on money from hop or apple production increased.
Hops and orchards did not guarantee a steady income but they could often be the difference between profit and loss in the mixed system of farming. Hop growing in Herefordshire was cheaper than elsewhere, but was confined to the eastern half of the county where the main commercial orchards were located. Profits in cider-making were not so widely fluctuating, but were still a rather irregular source of income.
In 1870-4 51.8% of the agricultural land of the vale was under arable. By 1895-9 the proportion was down to 38.51%. Over the same time span the proportion of temporary grass remained almost the same (around 9%), suggesting that arable was not allowed merely to fall to grass but was converted to pasture directly for use in the more profitable cattle enterprises. This pattern of conversion to grass occurred at the expense of the two main cereal crops, wheat and barley. The proportion of land under these two crops fell by 7.8% to 11.64% over the last five years of the 19th century. The main area where the grassing down occurred was to the south and south-west of Hereford in the mixed farming district.
Closely associated with the pattern of arable in the district was the distribution of sheep. The combination of recurrent disease and falling mutton prices produced a decline in sheep numbers. In the vale they were usually an important subsidiary enterprise, with an average of 70-80 sheep per 100 acres of agricultural land in 1870 decreasing to nearer 60 in 1900.
In the east of the vale grass-fed sheep predominated, but the main concentrations followed the sandy Wye terraces where light soils supported a Norfolk four-course rotation and sheep fed upon turnips or swede. The native Herefordshire breed, the Ryeland, by the 1870s was primarily confined to the sandy area around Ross-on-Wye and, in most of the county, repeated crossings with Leicesters had altered its characteristics.
The effects of the decreasing cereal prices can be seen in the reductions of rents and complaints of hardship from certain tenants, as well as in smaller cereal acreages. The vale became more pastorally biased but the arable sector remained an integral part of what was, in many cases, still a mixed-farming system.
Although more land was laid down to grass, this did not necessarily imply a decrease in the intensity of farming activity. In several instances an opposite trend was apparent. This was certainly the case in the decrease in the ages at which store stock were sent to the midland graziers and at which lambs were made ready for the butcher. The process operated partly as a response to the growing demand for different types of produce, e.g. more fresh milk, fruit and vegetables, and lean meat and less narcotic beers, and also as a response to unfavourable economic conditions in certain sectors of the farming industry.
Such changes represented a progression towards the mid-20th century patterns of an efficient agriculture with a diminished labour force and more mechanisation. There were other aspects of this intensification which were apparent around Hereford, one being the increase in the numbers of dairy cattle. In addition "Suburban Farming" - which included pigs, poultry and the growing of vegetables - also represented farming with a higher labour productivity that increased in importance in the late 19th century. This was true in Herefordshire but only to a limited extent because of the lack of a large urban market. Thus only around Hereford itself did potatoes occupy more than 2% of the arable land.
Underlying the changing distributions of farming activity were a series of decisions taken by individual tenant farmers and landowners. Farming is a business and economic factors played a major part in determining the type of enterprise and subsequent re-alignments of the farm economy. One important feature of the late Victorian period was the decreasing profit margins in most sectors of agriculture. In response to the decline in profit tenants and landlords restructured the other side of their financial scale, their costs.
Owner-occupier farming was not common in the Vale of Hereford, with 85.95% of agricultural land being rented by tenant farmers at the turn of the century. One of the tenant's biggest costs was his yearly rent.
[Original author: Miranda Greene, 2005]