Book I, Chapter XI, 2

In an open country, moreover, where corn is the principal crop, a well-enclosed piece of grassland will often command a higher rent than any neighboring cornfield. It is useful for keeping the cattle employed in cultivating the corn; in this case, its high rent is paid not so much out of the value of its own produce as out of that of the corn lands cultivated with its help. That rent will probably fall if the neighboring lands are ever completely enclosed. The high rent of enclosed land in Scotland at present seems to arise from the scarcity of enclosures, and will probably last only as long as that scarcity. Enclosure is more advantageous for pasture than for corn. It saves the labor of watching the cattle, which also feed better when they need not suffer disturbance from their keeper or his dog.

But where no such local advantage exists, the rent and profit of corn, or of whatever else is the people's usual vegetable food, must naturally regulate the rent and profit of pasture on land suited to producing that food.

The use of cultivated grasses, turnips, carrots, cabbages, and other means devised to enable a given area of land to feed more cattle than it would under natural grass might be expected to diminish somewhat the advantage that the price of butcher's meat naturally has over the price of bread in an improved country. It appears to have done so. There is some reason to believe that, at least in the London market, meat costs considerably less in relation to bread today than it did at the beginning of the last century.

In the Appendix to the life of Prince Henry, Doctor Birch gives an account of the prices that prince ordinarily paid for butcher's meat. We are told that the four quarters of an ox, weighing six hundred pounds, usually cost him nine pounds ten shillings, or thereabouts: thirty-one shillings and eight-pence per hundred pounds weight. Prince Henry died on the 6th of November 1612, in the nineteenth year of his age.

In March 1764, Parliament investigated the causes of the high price of provisions at the time. Among the evidence presented, a Virginia merchant testified that in March 1763 he had provisioned his ships with beef at twentyfour or twenty-five shillings the hundred weight, which he regarded as the ordinary price; but in the expensive year of 1764 he had paid twenty-seven shillings for the same weight and kind. Yet even this high price in 1764 is four shillings and eight-pence below the ordinary price paid by Prince Henry; and we must note that only the best beef is suitable for salting for such long voyages.

The price Prince Henry paid comes to 3d. ⅘ths per pound weight for the entire carcass, coarse and choice cuts together; at that rate the choice cuts could not have been retailed for less than 4½d. or 5d. a pound.

In the parliamentary inquiry of 1764, witnesses put the consumer's price of the choice cuts of the best beef at 4d. and 4½d. a pound, and that of the coarse cuts generally at anything from seven farthings to 2½d. and 2¾d. They said these prices were generally one halfpenny higher than those at which cuts of the same kinds had usually sold in March. But even these high prices remain considerably lower than we may reasonably suppose ordinary retail prices to have been in Prince Henry's day.

During the first twelve years of the last century, the average price of the best wheat at the Windsor market was £ 1:18:3½d. for a quarter of nine Winchester bushels.

But in the twelve years preceding 1764, including that year, the average price for the same measure of the best wheat at the same market was £ 2:1:9½d.

Thus, in the first twelve years of the last century, wheat appears to have been considerably cheaper, and butcher's meat considerably dearer, than in the twelve years preceding 1764, including that year.

In every large country, most cultivated land is employed to produce food either for people or for cattle. The rent and profit from these uses regulate the rent and profit from all other cultivated land. If a particular crop yielded less, the land would soon be turned to corn or pasture; if it yielded more, some land under corn or pasture would soon be turned to that crop.

Crops that require a greater initial expense to improve the land for them, or a greater yearly expense to cultivate it, do commonly appear to yield, in the first case, a higher rent, and in the second, a higher profit, than corn or pasture. Yet this advantage seldom amounts to more than reasonable interest on, or compensation for, the additional expense.

In a hop garden, an orchard, or a kitchen garden, both the landlord's rent and the farmer's profit are generally higher than in a cornfield or a grass field. But it costs more to bring the ground into this condition, so a higher rent is due to the landlord. Its management, too, calls for more care and skill, so a higher profit is due to the farmer. At least in the hop garden and the orchard, the crop is also less certain. Its price must therefore cover occasional losses as well as provide something like an insurance profit. Gardeners' circumstances—generally poor and always modest—may persuade us that their considerable ingenuity is not ordinarily rewarded too lavishly. So many wealthy people practice their delightful art for pleasure that those who practice it for profit can gain little from it: the very people who should be their best customers supply themselves with all its most precious products.

The landlord's advantage from such improvements seems never to have exceeded what was needed to repay the original cost of making them. In ancient agriculture, a well-watered kitchen garden seems to have been regarded, after the vineyard, as the farm's most valuable ground. But Democritus, who wrote on agriculture about two thousand years ago and whom the ancients regarded as one of the founders of the art, thought it unwise to enclose a kitchen garden. Its profits, he said, would not cover the expense of a stone wall; bricks—sun-dried bricks, I suppose—crumbled under rain and winter storms and needed continual repair. Columella, who records this judgment of Democritus, does not dispute it. Instead he proposes the economical expedient of a hedge of brambles and briers, which experience had shown him to be both lasting and impenetrable, but which was evidently not widely known in Democritus's time. Palladius accepts Columella's view, which Varro had recommended before him. In the judgment of these ancient agricultural improvers, the produce of a kitchen garden was apparently scarcely enough to cover the extra cultivation and the cost of watering it. In countries so near the sun, people thought it necessary then, as they do now, to have access to a stream whose water could be led to every garden bed. Throughout most of Europe, a kitchen garden is not now thought worth enclosing more securely than Columella recommended. In Great Britain and certain other northern countries, however, the finer fruits cannot be brought to perfection without a wall. Their price there must consequently cover the expense of building and maintaining something indispensable to their production. The fruit wall often surrounds the kitchen garden, which thus benefits from an enclosure that its own produce could seldom pay for.

That a vineyard, properly planted and brought to maturity, was the farm's most valuable ground seems to have been an unquestioned maxim of ancient agriculture, as it is of modern agriculture throughout the wine countries. Whether planting a new vineyard paid, however, was disputed among the ancient Italian farmers, as Columella tells us. Like a true devotee of elaborate cultivation, he comes down on the vineyard's side and attempts to show, by comparing profit with expense, that it is a highly advantageous improvement. Such comparisons of the costs and profits of new ventures are generally deceptive, and nowhere more so than in agriculture. If these plantations had commonly brought in as much as he imagined they might, there would have been no dispute. The question is still frequently debated in the wine countries today. Their agricultural writers, devoted as they are to promoting intensive cultivation, generally seem inclined to side with Columella in favor of the vineyard. In France, the anxiety of owners of established vineyards to prevent new ones from being planted seems to support that opinion, suggesting that people who have practical experience know this cultivation to be more profitable there at present than any other. At the same time, however, it suggests a further belief: that the extra profit will last only as long as the laws restricting the free cultivation of the vine. In 1731, they obtained an order of council forbidding both the planting of new vineyards and the renewal of old vineyards left uncultivated for two years, unless the king gave specific permission, granted only after the provincial intendant reported that he had inspected the land and found it unfit for any other cultivation. The stated reason for this order was a shortage of corn and pasture and an excess of wine. But if wine really had been so abundant, it would have prevented new vineyards without any order of council: the profit of growing vines would have fallen below its natural proportion to the profit of corn and pasture. As for the alleged shortage of corn brought about by multiplying vineyards, nowhere in France is corn cultivated more carefully than in wine-producing provinces where the land can grow it, such as Burgundy, Guienne, and the Upper Languedoc. The many workers employed in growing one crop necessarily encourage the other by providing a ready market for it. Reducing the number of people able to buy corn is surely an unpromising way to encourage its cultivation. It resembles a policy of encouraging agriculture by discouraging manufactures.

The rent and profit of crops that require either greater initial expense to prepare the land or greater yearly expense to cultivate it, therefore, may greatly exceed the rent and profit of corn and pasture; but if they do no more than repay those exceptional expenses, they are in fact regulated by the rent and profit of those ordinary crops.

It does sometimes happen, however, that too little land is suitable for a particular crop to meet the effectual demand. All of its produce can then be sold to people willing to pay somewhat more than enough to cover the rent, wages, and profit required to grow it and bring it to market at their natural rates, or at the rates paid on most other cultivated land. In this case, and ordinarily only in this case, the portion of the price remaining after all expenses of improvement and cultivation have been met need bear no regular relation to the corresponding surplus from corn or pasture: it can exceed that surplus by almost any amount. Most of the excess naturally goes to the landlord as rent.

The usual and natural relationship between the rent and profit of wine and those of corn and pasture, for example, applies only to vineyards producing ordinary good wine, which can be grown almost anywhere on light, gravelly, or sandy soil and has nothing to recommend it beyond its strength and wholesomeness. Only with vineyards of this kind can the country's ordinary land compete; it plainly cannot compete with vineyards of exceptional quality.

The vine is more sensitive to differences in soil than any other fruit tree. From some soils it draws a flavor that no amount of cultivation or management can, it is thought, reproduce in another. Whether real or imagined, this flavor may belong only to a few vineyards, may extend across most of a small district, or may be found in a considerable part of a large province. The entire quantity of these wines brought to market falls short of the effectual demand: the demand from people willing to pay the full rent, profit, and wages needed to prepare and bring them there at ordinary rates, or the rates paid in ordinary vineyards. The entire supply can therefore be sold to those willing to pay more, necessarily raising its price above that of ordinary wine. The difference rises or falls with the eagerness of buyers competing for a fashionable and scarce wine. Whatever its size, most of this difference goes to the landlord as rent. Though such vineyards are generally cultivated more carefully than most, the wine's high price seems less an effect of this care than its cause. Negligence threatens such valuable produce with losses so great that even the most careless are driven to attention. A small part of the high price is thus enough to cover the wages of the additional labor devoted to cultivation and the profits on the additional stock employed to set that labor in motion.

The sugar colonies held by the European nations in the West Indies may be compared to those prized vineyards. Their total produce falls short of Europe's effectual demand and can be sold to buyers willing to pay more than enough to cover the full rent, profit, and wages needed to prepare it and bring it to market at the rates ordinarily paid for other produce. In Cochin China, according to Mr Poivre [Voyages d’un Philosophe.], a very careful observer of its agriculture, the finest white sugar generally sells for three piastres the quintal, about thirteen shillings and sixpence in our money. The unit called a quintal there weighs from a hundred and fifty to two hundred Paris pounds, or a hundred and seventy-five Paris pounds on average. This puts the price per English hundred weight at about eight shillings sterling: not a fourth of the price commonly paid for the brown or muscovada sugar imported from our colonies, nor a sixth of that paid for the finest white sugar. Most cultivated land in Cochin China grows corn and rice, the food of the great majority of its people. The relative prices of corn, rice, and sugar there probably stand in their natural proportion: the relation that naturally prevails among the crops grown on most cultivated land and that rewards landlord and farmer, as nearly as one can calculate, in accordance with the usual initial cost of improvement and yearly cost of cultivation. In our sugar colonies, however, the price of sugar stands in no such relation to that of the crop of a rice or corn field in either Europe or America. It is often said that a sugar planter expects his rum and molasses to pay the whole cost of cultivation, leaving his sugar as pure profit. If this is true—I do not claim to verify it—it is as though a corn farmer expected his chaff and straw to cover his cultivation costs and his grain to be pure profit. We often see associations of merchants in London and other trading towns purchase uncultivated land in our sugar colonies, expecting to improve and cultivate it at a profit through factors and agents, despite the great distance and the uncertainty of returns caused by the defective administration of justice there. No one would try to improve and cultivate even the most fertile land in Scotland, Ireland, or the corn-growing provinces of North America in the same way, though the more reliable administration of justice in those places should promise more regular returns.

In an open area where corn is the main crop, an enclosed piece of grassland often brings in more rent than any nearby cornfield. It provides a convenient place to keep the cattle used to grow the corn. In this case, its high rent comes less from its own produce than from the cornfields that the cattle help cultivate. That rent is likely to fall if the neighboring fields are ever all enclosed. Enclosed land in Scotland now seems to bring in high rent because enclosed land is scarce. That high rent will probably last only as long as the scarcity does. Enclosure benefits pasture more than cornfields. It saves the work of watching the cattle. The animals also feed better when a keeper or his dog does not disturb them.

But where pasture has no such local advantage, rent and profit from corn, or from whatever plant provides people's usual food, must normally set the rent and profit of pasture on land suitable for growing that food.

Farmers now grow special grasses, turnips, carrots, and cabbages, and use other methods to feed more cattle on a given area than natural grass could support. One might expect this to reduce the usual gap, in a developed country, between the price of meat and the price of bread. It appears to have done so. There is some reason to believe that in the London market, at least, meat costs much less relative to bread now than it did at the beginning of the last century.

In the appendix to his life of Prince Henry, Doctor Birch gives the prices the prince usually paid for meat. He says that the four quarters of an ox weighing six hundred pounds usually cost him about nine pounds ten shillings. That is thirty-one shillings and eight-pence per hundred pounds weight. Prince Henry died on the 6th of November 1612, in the nineteenth year of his age.

In March 1764, Parliament investigated why food was so expensive at the time. Among the evidence, a Virginia merchant said that in March 1763 he had bought beef to provision his ships for twentyfour or twenty-five shillings per hundred weight. He considered that the normal price. But in the expensive year, he had paid twenty-seven shillings for the same weight and kind. Even this high 1764 price was four shillings and eight-pence below the ordinary price Prince Henry paid. And it should be noted that only the best beef is suitable for salting for such long voyages.

Prince Henry paid 3d. ⅘ths per pound weight for the whole carcass, counting both cheaper and better cuts. At that rate, the better cuts could not have retailed for less than 4½d. or 5d. the pound.

In the parliamentary investigation of 1764, witnesses said consumers paid 4d. and 4½d. the pound for the better cuts of the best beef. The cheaper cuts generally cost from seven farthings to 2½d. and 2¾d. They said these prices were generally one halfpenny higher than the usual prices for the same cuts in March. Yet even these high prices are considerably below what we can reasonably suppose ordinary retail prices were in Prince Henry's time.

During the first twelve years of the last century, the best wheat at Windsor market averaged £ 1:18:3½d. per quarter of nine Winchester bushels.

But in the twelve years preceding 1764 including that year, the same measure of the best wheat at the same market averaged £ 2:1:9½d.

So in the first twelve years of the last century, wheat appears to have been considerably cheaper, and meat considerably more expensive, than in the twelve years preceding 1764, including that year.

In every large country, most cultivated land produces food either for people or for cattle. The rent and profit from that land set the rent and profit from all other cultivated land. If a particular crop paid less, its land would soon be used for corn or pasture. If it paid more, some cornfields or pasture would soon be used for that crop.

Some crops require a higher initial cost to prepare the land, or a higher annual cost to cultivate it. They usually seem to bring in, respectively, higher rent or higher profit than corn or pasture. But the extra return seldom exceeds reasonable interest on, or compensation for, the extra expense.

A hop garden, an orchard, and a vegetable garden generally give the landlord more rent and the farmer more profit than a cornfield or pasture. But preparing the land for them costs more, which justifies higher rent. They also need more careful and skilled management, which justifies higher profit. The harvest, particularly in hop gardens and orchards, is less certain. The price must therefore cover occasional losses and provide something like an insurance profit. Gardeners are generally of modest means and never especially wealthy. That suggests their great skill is not usually overpaid. So many rich people practice gardening for pleasure that those who garden for profit gain little from it. The people who would naturally be their best customers grow their own finest produce.

The landlord's gain from such improvements seems never to have been greater than enough to cover their initial cost. In ancient farming, a well-watered vegetable garden was thought to produce the most valuable crop on a farm after a vineyard. But Democritus, who wrote on farming about two thousand years ago and was regarded by the ancients as a founder of the art, thought it unwise to enclose a vegetable garden. He said its profit would not cover a stone wall. Bricks (by which I suppose he meant sun-dried bricks) crumbled in rain and winter storms and needed constant repairs. Columella reports this judgment without arguing against it. Instead he suggests a very cheap enclosure: a hedge of brambles and briars. He says experience showed it made a durable, impenetrable fence. Apparently this was not widely known in Democritus's day. Palladius accepts Columella's view, which Varro had recommended earlier. To these ancient agricultural improvers, a vegetable garden's yield apparently barely covered the extra cultivation and watering. In countries so close to the sun, people then, as now, thought it necessary to have access to a stream that could water every garden bed. In most of Europe today, a vegetable garden is not considered worth a better fence than Columella's. In Great Britain and some other northern countries, the finer fruits cannot ripen properly without a wall. Their price must therefore pay for building and maintaining that wall. The fruit wall often encloses the vegetable garden too. The garden thus benefits from an enclosure that its own produce could seldom pay for.

In both ancient and modern wine-producing countries, a properly planted, fully productive vineyard has apparently always been considered the most valuable part of a farm. But ancient Italian farmers disputed whether planting a new vineyard was worthwhile, as Columella tells us. A true enthusiast for careful cultivation, he argues for the vineyard. He tries to show, by comparing profits and expenses, that planting one is highly profitable. But calculations of the likely profits and costs of new ventures are often misleading, especially in farming. If such vineyards had usually made as much money as he imagined they could, there would have been nothing to dispute. The issue is still often debated in wine-producing countries today. Agricultural writers who favor intensive cultivation generally side with Columella and support vineyards. In France, owners of established vineyards are eager to stop new ones being planted. This seems to support those writers' view: the owners, who have direct experience, evidently believe vineyards are now more profitable there than any other cultivation. At the same time, their behavior suggests they believe this extra profit will last only while laws restrict people from freely growing vines. In 1731 they obtained an order of council. It banned new vineyards and the renewal of old ones left uncultivated for two years, unless the king gave special permission. That permission could be granted only after the province's intendant reported that he had examined the land and found it unsuitable for any other crop. The stated reason for the order was a shortage of corn and pasture and too much wine. But if there really had been too much wine, no order would have been needed. The surplus would have driven vineyard profits below their normal relation to profits from corn and pasture, stopping people from planting new vineyards. As for the supposed shortage of corn caused by the spread of vineyards, nowhere in France is corn grown more carefully than on suitable land in the wine provinces, including Burgundy, Guienne, and the Upper Languedoc. The many people working in vineyards create a ready market for corn and thus encourage its cultivation. Reducing the number of people able to buy corn is surely a poor way to encourage corn growing. It is like trying to promote farming by discouraging manufacturing.

So crops that cost more to establish or cultivate each year can bring in much more rent and profit than corn and pasture. But if that difference merely covers the extra expense, their rent and profit are in fact governed by those of the ordinary crops.

Sometimes, though, too little land is suitable for a particular crop to meet the demand from buyers able to pay its normal cost. The whole crop can then be sold to people willing to pay more than the rent, wages, and profit needed to grow it and take it to market at the rates normally paid on most other cultivated land. In this case, and usually only in this case, the portion of its price left after all development and cultivation costs are paid need not bear any regular relation to the comparable portion from corn or pasture. It may be greater by almost any amount. Most of this extra return naturally becomes the landlord's rent.

For example, the usual relation between the rent and profit from wine and those from corn and pasture applies only to vineyards producing ordinary good wine. Such wine can grow almost anywhere on light, gravelly, or sandy soil. Its only special qualities are its strength and wholesomeness. Ordinary land can compete with those vineyards. It clearly cannot compete with vineyards producing wine of a distinctive quality.

Differences in soil affect vines more than any other fruit tree. Some soils are thought to give wine a flavor that no methods of growing or making it can reproduce elsewhere. Whether real or imagined, this flavor sometimes belongs to just a few vineyards, sometimes to most of a small district, and sometimes to a substantial part of a large province. The amount of such wine brought to market is less than buyers would take at a price that covered the ordinary rent, profit, and wages needed to make and deliver it, as those costs are paid in ordinary vineyards. All of it can therefore be sold to buyers willing to pay more, raising its price above that of ordinary wine. How much more depends on how fashionable and scarce the wine is, and therefore how fiercely buyers compete for it. Most of the difference, whatever its size, goes to the landlord as rent. It is true that these vineyards generally receive more careful cultivation than most others. But their high wine price appears to cause that care, rather than result from it. Neglecting such valuable grapes would be so costly that even the most careless grower must pay attention. Only a small part of the higher price is needed to pay for the extra labor and the profit on the extra stock used to employ that labor.

The European nations' sugar colonies in the West Indies are comparable to these valuable vineyards. Their total output falls short of the demand in Europe from buyers able to pay the ordinary rent, profit, and wages needed to produce sugar and take it to market. It can therefore be sold to people willing to pay more. In Cochin China, the finest white sugar generally sells for three piastres the quintal, about thirteen shillings and sixpence of our money. This is reported by Mr Poivre [Voyages d’un Philosophe.], a very careful observer of farming there. The local quintal weighs from a hundred and fifty to two hundred Paris pounds, averaging a hundred and seventy-five Paris pounds. That puts the price per English hundred weight at about eight shillings sterling. This is less than a fourth of the usual price of brown or muscovada sugar imported from our colonies, and less than a sixth of the price of the finest white sugar. Most cultivated land in Cochin China grows corn and rice, the food of most people. The prices of corn, rice, and sugar there are probably in their natural relation: the relation usually found among crops grown on most cultivated land. It pays the landlord and farmer roughly in line with the usual initial cost of preparing land and annual cost of cultivation. But in our sugar colonies the price of sugar has no such relation to the crop from a rice field or cornfield in Europe or America. People commonly say a sugar planter expects rum and molasses to cover every cultivation expense, leaving the sugar as pure profit. I do not claim this is true. But if it is, it would be like a corn farmer expecting the chaff and straw to cover all growing costs and the grain to be pure profit. Groups of merchants in London and other trading towns often buy unused land in our sugar colonies. They expect to improve and farm it profitably through factors and agents despite the great distance and the uncertainty of returns caused by poor administration of justice there. Nobody tries to improve and farm even the most fertile land in Scotland, Ireland, or the corn provinces of North America in this way. The better administration of justice there would make returns more reliable.