The Agricultural Notebook E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 2149

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Offers a complete update and revision to the manual for agriculture, geography, and rural studies

The 21st edition of the quintessential reference book on agriculture is filled with updated and new material that provides those in the farming profession with everything they need to know about today’s agricultural industry. Filled with contributions from top experts in the field, it provides not only the scientific explanations behind agriculture, but also a range of further reading .

The Agricultural Notebook, 21st Edition features new chapters that address wildlife, the fundamentals of agricultural production, and the modern techniques critical to the industry. It offers new chapters on sheep, goats, ruminant nutrition, monogastric nutrition, and resource management. It also takes a more in-depth approach to plant nutrition, and greater attention to environmental elements. Other topics covered include: soil management & crop nutrition; animal welfare; crop physiology; farm woodland management; farm machinery; and more.

•       Reflects recent changes in the world of agriculture, farming, and the rural environment
•       Features a new chapter on Resource Management
•       Offers separate chapters on goats, sheep, and applied nutrition
•       Every chapter is revised by experts in their subject area

The Agricultural Notebook is an essential purchase for all students of agriculture, countryside, and rural studies. It will also greatly benefit farmers, land agents, agricultural scientists, advisers, and suppliers to the agriculture industry.

Leseprobe

The Agricultural Notebook

Twenty‐first Edition

Edited by

Richard J. Soffe

Rural Business SchoolDuchy and Bicton CollegesandAgriculture and Horticulture Development BoardUnited Kingdom

Matt Lobley

University of ExeterUnited Kingdom

This Twenty‐first edition first published 2021© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition HistoryJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd (1e, 1883), Blackwell Publishing (18e, 1988), Blackwell Publishing (19e, 1995), Blackwell Publishing (20e, 2003)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Richard J. Soffe and Matt Lobley to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Soffe, R. J., editor. | Lobley, Matt, editor.Title: The agricultural notebook / edited by Richard J. Soffe, Rural Business School, Duchy and Bicton College, United Kingdom, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom.Description: Twenty‐first edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2020028750 (print) | LCCN 2020028751 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119560364 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119560401 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119560333 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture–Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Agriculture–Great Britain–Handbooks, manuals, etc.Classification: LCC S513.2 .M33 2021 (print) | LCC S513.2 (ebook) | DDC 338.10941–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028750LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028751

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © LedyX/Shutterstock

Preface

Often described as the ‘bible’ for agricultural, geography and rural students, this twenty‐first edition has been completely revised and updated. The Agricultural Notebook has new chapters on dairying and beef production, sheep and goats. Applied animal nutrition deals with ruminants and monogastrics in more detail than previous editions. Similarly, more space is devoted to plant nutrition, whilst environmental elements are given greater prominence in the farming and wildlife chapter.

The first edition produced over 130 years ago by Primrose McConnell in 1883 established itself as a standard work. Primrose McConnell, a tenant farmer of Ongar Park Hall, Essex, stated that he found… ‘a great want of a book containing all the data associated with the business of farming’ and as a result The Agricultural Notebook was formed.

The editors are very grateful to the team that has contributed to this new edition; also to a wider group of colleagues and friends who have helped guide the content of this edition. The challenge of the changing rural scene is evident in the range of current debates on the future of rural businesses and rural areas.

Our primary aim has been to meet the needs of students studying a range of agricultural, food and rural subjects. We have received many useful comments from universities, colleges and schools across the world who have been using The Agricultural Notebook to teach geography and a host of related subjects. Additionally, we hope it is of value to farmers, landowners and advisors in their many roles.

Primrose McConnell: A brief biographical sketch

P.W. Brassley

‘I wish I had not been born for a hundred years to come, for there will be so many things found out after I am done with …’, wrote Primrose McConnell in the spring of 1906. It was typical of him: always fascinated by the latest discoveries and inventions, but concerned to test them against his own extensive knowledge and experience.

McConnell was born at Lesnessock Farm, near Ochiltree in Ayrshire, on 11 April 1856, the son and grandson of tenant farmers. After leaving Ayr Academy he was apprenticed to a Glasgow engineering firm, but subsequently, in the 1870s, went to the University of Edinburgh, which did not then offer degrees in agriculture but prepared students for the diploma examinations of the Highland and Agricultural Society. McConnell passed in 1878, and a little later also passed the certificate examinations of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. When Edinburgh eventually introduced a degree, he returned, and was the second student to be awarded the BSc in Agriculture in 1886.

The Notebook is his lasting memorial, but his writing was based on the foundation of his other activities, as farmer, scientist, engineer and inventor, traveller, lecturer and all‐round man of agricultural affairs. Farming formed the foundation of his life. He first rented the 636‐acre Ongar Park Hall Farm, about 20 miles from London, near Epping in Essex, initially in partnership with his father. When he began farming, half of the land was in arable, but this was in 1883, when cheap grain from the new world was beginning to make life difficult for corn producers on stiff London clays. He therefore grassed down about 200 acres and based his farming upon dairying (he had about 60 cows in milk at any one time) and feeding bullocks, heifers and sheep. In 1905 he moved. Why? ‘For the very good reason that I was losing more money than I could afford’, he wrote soon afterwards, ‘but also for various other reasons’, which in fact centred on a dispute with his landlord over how he was to be compensated for capital invested in buildings. The case went to court, and McConnell had the better of the legal arguments, but he was left with a jaundiced view of landlords. He was the owner‐occupier of his new farm, North Wycke, 500 acres of land ‘as flat as a table’ near Southminster in Essex, between the Crouch and Blackwater estuaries, with ‘nothing higher than a tree or a house between me and the Ural Mountains’. When he began to farm there, it was half arable and half grass, and he kept 80 cows, nine work horses, a pony, two dogs, three tomcats and ‘135 head of poultry of all breeds under the sun, including those that do not lay in winter’. He was understocked, he knew, but he was too short of capital to buy any more. He continued to farm there until he died in 1931.

McConnell farmed to make money, but not only to make money. Fascinated by the scientific and technical problems involved, he attempted to deal with them professionally, as befitted an agricultural graduate. He tried machine milking, found that it resulted in decreased yields, and so went back to hand milking. Then, after considering his experiences for a year or so, he wrote a detailed article for the Agricultural Gazette setting out the costs, technical details, yield changes and probable explanations, before concluding that ‘It is rather a dangerous thing to prophesy as to future inventions, and we do not know what mankind may accomplish in another generation. We may, therefore, still see a successful milking machine, but it has not arrived yet.’ He was an early advocate of milk recording and kept a Gerber fat testing machine in his dairy. He experimented with silage and he designed his own elevator. The string‐binder, he thought, was the greatest invention of the nineteenth century. He had ‘an outfit of every possible kind of tool in my workshop on the farm that is likely to be of use’, and was ‘never … happier than when at the bench or vice’. When he wanted to try out a new plough, he would use it himself for a day, with a dynamometer between the horses and the plough. Not surprisingly, the shortcomings of farm machinery provoked some of his more vitriolic comments. McConnell also led a busy life away from the farm. He lectured, at various times, at the Glasgow Veterinary College (where he was appointed Professor of Agriculture at the age of 24) and Oxford and Edinburgh universities and the Essex Winter School of Agriculture (the forerunner of Writtle College), and examined at Reading, Wye and the Royal Agricultural College. He was a Fellow of the Geological Society. He was on the Council of the Dairy Show and a milking judge there, and involved with the British Dairy Farmers’ Association and the Eastern Counties Co‐operative Dairy Farmers’ Association. He visited farms in Holland in 1899 and made at least two trips to North America, in 1890 and 1893, on one occasion meeting some of the Sioux who had taken part in the Custer massacre in 1876. He was also one of the pioneers in the migration of farmers from Scotland to Essex in the late nineteenth century. No sooner had he found his farm at Ongar Park Hall than he was writing articles about the potential of Essex farms for the North British Agriculturalist.

And it is as a writer that he is now best remembered. ‘I began to write to the farm papers at the age of eighteen, when first learning to hold the plough’, he recalled, and he produced eleven editions of the Notebook between 1883, when he was 27, and 1930, the year before his death at the age of 75. He also wrote The Elements of Farming (1896), an elementary textbook, The Elements of Agricultural Geology (1902), The Diary of a Working Farmer (1906) and The Complete Farmer (1908), in addition to articles in the journals of the Royal Agricultural Society of England and the Bath and West Society. Later he spent many years as dairy editor of the Agricultural Gazette and editor of Farm Life. Thus he was academically successful, and he clearly enjoyed writing. But it is also evident from his diary that he enjoyed physical work too: he writes enthusiastically of making his own cheese, digging, ploughing and broadcasting, and stooking even though the sheaves are drawing blood from his forearms. He was a teetotaller and a dissenting churchman (his wife Katherine was the daughter of a Free Church minister) who took a five‐day study tour with the British Dairy Farmers’ Association as his annual holidays. He took an unsentimental attitude to landscape: ‘in a level district you get a great wide sky, and the sun shines longer’. But if this suggests the stereotypical dour Scot, then his irascibility, his sense of humour and his benevolent interest in the world around him keep breaking through, as does his pride in his family, when he mentions that his daughter Ann is an accredited dairymaid, and prints a photograph of his sons Archibald and Primrose (who was to be killed in the last days of the First World War). Farming, and thinking and writing about farming, provided him with stimulation and satisfaction. Fortunately, there was always something new to learn: ‘Agriculture is a very wide subject, and no one can master it all within the limits of an ordinary lifetime’.

Sources

Most of the material used here is taken from McConnell’s The Diary of a Working Farmer (1906) and from his obituary, published in the [Essex] Weekly News of Friday, 10 July 1931. For the latter, an enormous amount of other biographical material on McConnell, and many perceptive editorial comments, the author is indebted to Elizabeth Sellers of Chelmsford

Contributors

Matthew A. Back, BSc, MSc, PhD, PGDE

Present appointment: Reader in Plant Nematology, Crop & Environment Science Department, Harper Adams University, Newport, Shropshire, UK.

Research interests include management and biology of plant parasitic nematodes with specific expertise on the application of biofumigation. At Harper Adams University Matthew teaches topics concerned with plant pathology and plant disease management.

Paul Brassley, BSc(Hons), BLitt, PhD

Present appointment: Honorary University Fellow, University of Exeter.

Formerly a Research Fellow in the Centre for Rural Policy Research at Exeter, following many years teaching agricultural policy and rural history at Seale‐Hayne College, which became part of the University of Plymouth. He has also held visiting chairs at the University of Santiago de Compostela (2012) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2020). He was appointed to a three‐year term as President of the British Agricultural History Society in 2019. Among his recent publications are Agriculture: a Very Short Introduction (with Richard Soffe, Oxford University Press, 2016).

Rick Brunt, BSc(Hons), PGDip Occupational Health and Safety, CMIOSH, Chartered Registered Safety Practitioner.

Present appointment: Deputy Director, Head of Operational Strategy, Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Her Majesty’s Inspector of Health and Safety.

Previous appointments have included: Head of Operations, HSE North West; Head of Inspector training, HSE Merseyside; Learning and Development Business Partner.

Emily J. Burton, PhD

Present appointment: Professor in Sustainable Food Production, School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Emily is president of the World’s Poultry Science Association (WPSA) UK Branch and represents the UK in the European Working Groups on Nutrition (WG2) and Education and Information (WG11). Alongside her research, Emily’s passion is for helping students to develop into scientists capable of making a tangible contribution to the advancement of animal science. Her research focuses on understanding interactions between feed materials and gastrointestinal environment in poultry in both developed and developing countries

Gian Lorenzo D’Alterio DVM, PhD, MSc FRCVS, Diplomate of the European College of Small Ruminant Health and Management

Veterinary private practitioner with Damory Veterinary Clinic, Blandford Forum, Dorset, UK.

Gian completed a residency at the farm animal practice of Bristol Vet School in Langford and has spent many years working in private practice on sheep and goat health management in both the meat and dairy sector

Louisa Dines MPhil, Member of BASIS and FACTS Professional Register

Present appointment: Principal Lecturer in Agronomy, Harper Adams University, Newport, Shropshire, UK.

Course tutor for agriculture and Course Manager for BASIS Certificate in Crop Protection. Previous appointments have included agronomist and technical support manager for a national distributor company.

Ian C. Dodd, PhD (Lancaster), BSc (Queensland).

Present appointment: Professor of Sustainable Agriculture, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK.

Research interests include crop water use efficiency, deficit irrigation and rhizobacteria. Ian is Director of Studies of Lancaster’s MSc Food Security (Distance Learning) and Associate Editor of both the Journal of Experimental Botany & Plant and Soil.

Gemma Eales, BSc (Hons)

Present appointment: Research Leader, Rural Business School, Duchy College, UK.

Gemma graduated in Biological Sciences from the University of Exeter and has spent over 14 years working in agricultural knowledge exchange and research, with a particular focus on sustainable agriculture and animal health. Research interests include farmland conservation, ecology and grassland‐based systems, particularly multi‐species swards.

John Eddison

Present appointment: Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Biological & Marine Sciences, University of Plymouth, UK.

Prior to retiring in 2015, John was an associate professor in applied ethology at the University of Plymouth lecturing undergraduates and MSc students on applied behaviour and welfare of animals managed by humans, and supervising many postgraduate research students. For 10 years (prior to and since retirement) he was an appointed animal welfare expert on a committee of a UK government department and, for a further three years, a member of the animal welfare committee of the French biosecurity agency (ANSES). In addition, he has provided expert evidence on the behaviour of livestock in more than 25 legal cases across the UK and the Republic of Ireland where humans have been seriously injured or killed by farm animals.

E. David Elphinstone, PhD (University of Nottingham), BSc (University of Nottingham).

Retired – Director of Research, Myerscough College and University Centre, UK.