Chapter 6
Rural England
There is another great change of theme at this stage of Haggard's biography. For some time after the death of his son, Jock, he had not felt fulfilled by the task of romance writing:
...the unrealities of fiction writing greatly wearied me, oddly enough much more than they do at present, when they have become a kind of amusement and set- off to the more serious things and thoughts with which my life is occupied.
The “serious things and thoughts” [1] were more to do with a wish to explore rural England and to become involved with the land, agricultural reform and the colonies.
He ”grew to think”[2] that he was destined (destiny playing a large part in his thinking) to play a part in the research of agricultural affairs. Haggard commenced in 1898 a book entitled “A Farmer’s Year”.[3] It was to be a record of the lives and state of being of people engaged in agriculture in England at the very end of the nineteenth-century.
A Farmer’s Year was subtitled “Being the Commonplace Book for 1898.” Haggard remained, after all, an expert in farming – he had farmed for many years at Ditchingham on land of 365 acres purchased for six thousand pounds in 1865 by Major John Margitson (Louisa’s father). As such, he had a good understanding of the agricultural life of England. His work is radical in that it proposed changes to farming methods that had been established over centuries – more rotation of crops, better drainage of fields (he called for his agricultural labourers to “lay drainage pipes in the ditch”)[4] and improved husbandry of cattle. Haggard promoted the use of footpaths and hedgerows to encourage the spread of wild life. He was concerned about the rural depopulation starting to increase at the turn of the century due to the population escape to the towns and competition from foreign imports of cereals. It was such that “a neighbouring farm of nearly two hundred acres had been reduced to that of the bailiff in charge of it and one horseman through the winter months.”[5]
Haggard introduced better methods of remunerating agricultural labourers[6] and paid his own workers a good rate for the time. He mildly supported the spread of mechanised farming that was being introduced into East Anglia making farming of cereals on an industrial scale. He believed in the manuring of crops for he spent “about two shillings (10p) the load as it lies upon the heap.”[7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Agricultural_Practices
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ag180
But Rider would be amazed to see the conditions of cattle today where an artificially inseminated heifer neither sees the bull, nor is even allowed to suckle her offspring. He would have been revolted at the conditions in English farming, including feed for ruminants containing animal material, that persists to this day and caused the outbreak of mad cow disease in the eighties which led to the slaughter and burning of tens of thousands of cows.
Modern agriculture has changed the whole character of East Anglia, altering the landscape, destroying hedges and wildlife and generally contri