The transition from shepherding to fencing in colonial Australia was a technological revolution replacing labour with capital. Fencing could not be widespread in Australia until an historical conjunction of technological, social and economic changes: open camping of sheep (from about 1810), effective poisoning of dingoes with strychnine (from the mid-1840s), introduction of iron wire (1840s), better land tenure (from 1847), progressive reduction of Aboriginal populations, huge demand for meat (from 1851) and high wages (from 1851). Labour shortages in the gold-rushes of the early 1850s were the final trigger, but all the other changes were essential precursors. Available data are used to test the alleged benefits of fencing: a higher wool cut per head; an increased carrying capacity; savings in wages and the running costs of stations; less disease in flocks; larger sheep; higher lambing percentages, and use of land unsuitable for shepherding. Many of the benefits were real, but some cannot be verified. By the mid-1880s, over ninety-five per cent of sheep in New South Wales were in paddocks, wire fences were spreading rapidly, and the cost of fences was falling. However, shepherding persisted in remote northern areas of Australia until well into the twentieth century.

This paper examines the growth of peasant/farmer cooperatives in the German state of Bavaria in the years circa 1880–1914. The remarkable increase in the number of cooperative ventures in rural Germany, seen most clearly in the proliferation of credit cooperatives (Raiffeisenvereine), has attracted scant attention from historians. This study of the phenomenon in Bavaria suggests that the longer-term structural problems of peasant agriculture, compounded by seasonal crises and the absence of adequate structures of credit for small producers, all helped to make peasant farmers more receptive to cooperative innovation. In addition, however, state encouragement, galvanised in no small measure by the marked and, for the Bavarian state, discomfiting politicisation of agrarian interests in the early 1890s, was also instrumental in the extension of the cooperative idea. Certainly the more demagogic agrarian lobbies of the period, whether in Bavaria or in Germany as a whole, protested loudly that self-help measures such as cooperative credit, purchase and sales counted for relatively little, and that the only sure protection for farmers in the face of rapidly changing market conditions was large-scale state subvention, above all in the form of higher tariffs. However, the evidence presented here suggests that political demands to insulate the peasantry from change in fact formed part of a critical interplay between agrarian mobilisation, state intervention and cooperative initiatives whose effects, even if difficult to calculate exactly, undoubtedly contributed to the improvements in peasant farming in this period.

Cooperatives began contributing to the modernisation of European agriculture in the late nineteenth century but the rate at which they developed varied according to countries, regions, and crops. In Spain a large number were set up before the 1936−9 Civil War but few actually became consolidated entities. This paper analyses the Spanish case in an attempt to find the keys to the success or failure of cooperation. It focuses especially on the role played by the state and on the attitude shown by the different segments of farmers towards cooperatives.

This article looks at a small English rural estate, and at the role of its squire, in the early twentieth century. It describes the estate, parish and village of Holton-le-Moor as inherited by the Reverend T.G. Dixon in 1906, and assesses his impact on all three areas of local society during the following thirty years. Although he was a conscientious landlord and a devoted churchman, his most lasting influence was on the life of the village. Both conservative and progressive in his views, his inconsistencies reflected a rural society in transition; but, especially in providing a village hall in 1910, he anticipated and facilitated post-First World War developments in the structure of village life. Relations between the rural aristocracy and its dependents have often been described in terms of paternalism on the one hand and deference on the other. This article suggests that ideas of community may sometimes be more useful when considering the dealings of a small squire with his villagers.

State intervention in the United Kingdom's farming industry was necessitated by the problems of the interwar depression and the lead up to World War Two and the emergency wartime food programme. This brought the need for greater bureaucratic machinery which would connect individual farmers and their communities with central government. Crucial from 1939 in this respect was the formation of the County War Agricultural Executive Committees, which became the channels through which English farming was propelled into postwar productivism. Using relatively newly-available documentary material, this article demonstrates the role the committees played in the transmission of national policies down to the local level, their composition and membership. In so doing it also places the economic changes within farming into the vital but under-researched context of their rural social relations during the Second World War.

This paper analyses the response of Kansas wheat growers to major market intervention brought about by New Deal farm policies. Congress hoped to trigger a sharp price increase by persuading farmers to reduce the acreage on which they cultivated wheat. However, the actual responses in terms of planting strategies and farm machinery purchases are complex and only evident once the analysis is conducted at the county level. Marked regional variations in the impact of the weather during the ‘Dust Bowl’ decade also played a crucial role in this analysis. This article shows that even when considering a crop grown in a single state, the reaction of farmers to policy initatives can be varied and very difficult to predict.