The first president was Sir John Sinclair, and the first secretary Arthur Young, with a salary of £400 a year, which he thought insufficient.[505] The first task of the new board was that of preparing statistical accounts of English agriculture, and it was intended to take in hand the commutation of tithes, which would have been a great boon to farmers, with whom the prevailing system of collecting tithes was very unpopular; but the Primate's opposition stopped this. The board appointed lecturers, procured a reward for Elkington for his draining system, encouraged Macadam in his plans for improving roads, and Meikle the inventor of the thrashing machine, and obtained the removal of taxes on draining tiles, and other taxes injurious to agriculture. It also recommended the allotment system, and Sinclair desired 3 acres and a cow for every industrious cottager. During the abnormally high prices of provisions from 1794-6, the quartern loaf in London in 1795 being 1s. 6d., though next year it dropped to 73/4d.,[506] the board made experiments in making bread with substitutes for wheat, which resulted in a public exhibition of eighty different sorts of bread. Its efforts were generally followed by increased zeal among agriculturists; but Sinclair, an able but impetuous man,[507] appears to have taken things too much into his own hands and pushed them too speedily.
Financial difficulties came, chiefly owing to the cost of the surveys, which had been hurried on with undue haste and often with great carelessness, the surveyors sometimes being men who knew nothing of the subject.
Sinclair was deposed from the presidency in 1798, and succeeded by Lord Somerville. He again was succeeded by Lord Carrington, under whose presidency the board offered premiums (the first of £200), owing to the high price of wheat and consequent distress, for essays on the best means of converting certain portions of grass land into tillage without exhausting the soil, and of returning the same to grass, after a certain period, in an improved state, or at least without injury. The general report, based on the information derived from these essays, states that no high price of corn or temporary distress would justify the ploughing up of old meadows or rich pastures, and that on certain soils well adapted to grass age improves the quality of the pasture to a degree which no system of management on lands broken up and laid down can equal. In spite of this, the cupidity of landowners and farmers, when wheat was a guinea a bushel or at prices near it, led to the ploughing up of much splendid grass land, which was never laid down again until, perhaps in recent years, owing to the low price of grain; so that some of the land at all events has, owing to bad times, returned to the state best suited to it.
The board looked upon the enclosure and cultivation of waste lands, which in England they estimated at 6,000,000 acres,[508] as a panacea for the prevailing distress, and after much opposition they managed to pass through both Houses in 1801 a Bill cheapening and facilitating the process of parliamentary enclosure. This Act, 41 Geo. III, c. 109, 'extracted a number of clauses from various private Acts and enacted that they should hold good in all cases where the special Act did not expressly provide to the contrary.' Another benefit rendered to agriculture was the establishment in 1803 of lectures on agricultural chemistry, the first lecturer engaged being Mr., afterwards Sir Humphry, Davy, who may be regarded as the father of agricultural chemistry.
In 1806 Sinclair was re-elected president, and his second term was mainly devoted to completing the agricultural surveys of the different counties, which, before his retirement in 1813, he had with one or two exceptions the satisfaction of seeing finished. Though over-impetuous, he rendered valuable service to agriculture, not only by his own energy but by stirring up energy in others; as William Wilberforce the philanthrophist said, 'I have myself seen collected in that small room several of the noblemen and gentlemen of the greatest properties in the British Isles, all of them catching and cultivating an agricultural spirit, and going forth to spend in the employment of labourers, and I hope in the improvement of land, immense sums which might otherwise have been lavished on hounds and horses, or squandered on theatricals.'
Among the numerous subjects into which the board inquired was the divining rod for finding water, which was tested in Hyde Park in 1801, and successfully stood the test. In 1805, Davy the chemist reported on a substance in South America called 'guana', which he had analysed and found to contain one-third of ammoniacal salt with other salts and carbon, but its use was not to come for another generation. From the time of Sinclair's retirement in 1813 the board declined. Arthur Young, its secretary, had become blind and his capacity therefore impaired. One year its lack of energy was shown by the return of £2,000 of the Government grant to the Treasury because it had nothing to spend it on. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, was against it, the clergy feared the commutation of tithe which the board advocated, the legal profession was against the Enclosure Act, the landed interest thought the surveys were intended for purposes of taxation; and the grant being withdrawn, an effort to maintain the board by voluntary subscription failed, so that it dissolved in 1822, after doing much valuable work for English agriculture.
Before its extinction it had held in 1821, at Aldridge's Repository, the first national agricultural show. £685 was given in prizes, and the entries included 10 bulls, 9 cows and heifers, several fat steers and cows, 7 pens of Leicester and Cotswold rams and ewes; 12 pens of Down, and 9 or 10 pens of Merino rams and ewes.[509] Most of the cattle shown were Shorthorn, or Durham, as they were then called, with some Herefords, Devons, Longhorns, and Alderneys. There were also exhibits of grass, turnip-seed, roots, and implements.
This first national show had been preceded by many local ones.[510] The end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries saw the establishment all over England of farmers' clubs, cattle shows, and ploughing matches.
The period now before us is marked by the great work of the Collings, who next to Bakewell did most to improve the cattle of the United Kingdom. Charles Colling was born in 1751, and the scene of his famous labours was Ketton near Darlington. He had learnt from Bakewell the all-importance of quality in cattle, and determined to improve the local Shorthorn breed near his own home, which had been described in 1744 as 'the most profitable beasts for the dairyman, butcher, and grazier, with their wide bags, short horns, and large bodies.' He was to make these 'profitable beasts' the best all-round cattle in the world, and to succeed where George Culley had failed. The first bull of merit he possessed was 'Hubback',[511] described as a little yellow, red, and white five-year-old, which was mated with cows afterwards to be famous, named Duchess, Daisy, Cherry, and Lady Maynard. At first Colling was against in-breeding, and not until 1793 did he adopt it, more by accident than intention, but the experiment being successful he became an enthusiast. The experiment was the putting of Phoenix to Lord Bolingbroke, who was both her half-brother and her nephew, and the result was the famous Favourite. A young farmer who saw Favourite and his sister at Darlington in 1799, was so struck by them that he paid Colling the first 100 guineas ever given for a Shorthorn cow.[512]
One of Hubback's daughters had in 1795, by Favourite, a roan calf which grew to be the celebrated Durham Ox, which at five and a half years weighed 3,024 lb., and was sold for £140. It was sold again for £250, the second purchaser refusing £2,000 for it, and taking it round England on show made a profitable business out of it, in one day in London making £97. A still more famous animal was the bull Comet, born 1804, which at the great sale in 1810 fetched 1,000 guineas. This bull was the crowning triumph of Colling's career and the result of very close breeding, being described as the best bull ever seen, with a fine masculine head, broad and deep chest, shoulders well laid back, loins good, hind-quarters long, straight and well packed, thighs thick, with nice straight hocks and hind legs. Perhaps Colling thought he had pursued in-and-in breeding too far, at all events in 1810 he dispersed his famous herd. The sale was held at a most propitious time, for the Durham Ox had advertised the name of Colling far and wide, and owing to the war prices were very high. Comet fetched 1,000 guineas, and the other forty-seven lots averaged £151 8s. 5d., an unheard-of sale, yet all the auctioneer got was 5 guineas, much of the work of the sale falling on the owner, and the former sold the stock with a sand-glass.