Jethro Tull

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a number of British farmers such as Jethro Tull of Berkshire and Norfolk’s Charles Townshend, began experimenting with newfangled equipment and techniques such as seed drills, fertiliser use and crop rotations. These were often mocked by their peers, and some caught on while others didn’t. At the same time, successive governments were making it easy for the wealthy to enclose common land. Once you owned or farmed a lot of land, you had an interest in maximising the return from it, which gave you a motivation for trying out those new ideas and using the ones that produced more crops. And thus the form of farming we now know came about, founded on what amounted to massive government intervention, plus ideas developed on little plots of land, by people who some considered impractical if not barmy.

Of course, no one knew at the time that Tull, Townshend and the government were inventing modern agriculture, and no one can know now whether some aspect of our food’s future might be being invented