In an interview on The English Countryside

Your next book talks about the way economic forces have affected the countryside. Tell me about Alternative Agriculture.

The full title, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day, gives you an idea about what the book is about. In many ways it sums up Joan Thirsk’s life’s work. The book is based around a very simple but powerful idea. Thirsk divides the history of agriculture into two sorts of period, ‘mainstream periods’ and ‘alternative periods’. In the ‘mainstream periods’ agriculture has focused on producing its principal products: cereals and meats. In the ‘alternative periods’, when the prices of cereals and meat tends to go down, farmers are forced to look for other ways of making money. She argues that it’s during these times that farmers come up with different ways of doing things. For example, in one of her alternative periods at the end of the 19th century, the modern dairy industry was born. Before this period most dairy farmers had focused on producing butter and cheese and only had a local market for milk, but when the demand for other products dropped farmers began to produce liquid milk for urban consumption. Obviously now milk is one of the mainstream industries. Her idea is that there are periods when there is less demand for whatever it might be and this forces agriculture to really question what it is doing and change.

But the agricultural industry tends to be thought of as one which finds it difficult to change. Do you agree with this view?

Agriculture does have this reputation for being very traditionalist. But it can be very dynamic. Farming can change incredibly rapidly when it needs to. Let’s go right back to the Black Death period: at least a third of the population died, taking out a large portion of the demand for basic food stuffs. What did people do? They said: ‘If we can't sell grain, what can we sell?’ And that’s the start of an enormous expansion of wool production. A more recent example is the time between 1945 and 1965 when agriculture was innovating very rapidly; its rate of output growth was probably faster than the growth of British industry at the time. I would argue that agriculture is actually very flexible.