Hutton the Farmer
James Hutton describes farming as ‘in a manner the story of my life’. He inherited two Berwickshire farms (Slighhouses and Nether Monynut), from his father William. Slighhouses belong to the Huttons for three generations. James Hutton’s great-uncle, John, bought it from John Renton in 1713 for 9850 merks (a merk was worth thirteen shillings and fourpence). James Hutton’s father bought Nether Monynut in 1710 before he had Slighhouses.
Hutton’s Neighbour
Click or tap below to hear Ian Kellie, who lives near Hutton’s farm, imagine what a neighbouring farmer might have thought of James Hutton’s new ideas on agriculture.
With income deriving from his sal ammoniac business, Hutton’s decision to farm will not necessarily have been driven by the need to earn a living. While there is some speculation as to why Hutton left Edinburgh as a young man to pursue life as a farmer, he is (in the opinion of his biographer, John Playfair), likely to have been influenced in his decision by Sir John Hall of Dunglass. Sir John owned Godscroft adjacent to Nether Monynut and had a poor opinion of Slighhouses. It is apparent that Hutton was reluctant to farm but nevertheless adapted to rural life with ease.
Learning to Farm and Travels Abroad
James Hutton was the third generation of Huttons to farm here. He built the house in traditional style and revolutionised Berwickshire Farming by treating agriculture as a science. Aspects of his farming legacy are still evident today and his interest in geology, as seen in the old gateway to his house, which is constructed in rocks of Red Sandstone and Greywacke.
Returning to Slighhouses and Farm Improvement
Once he returned to Slighhouses, Hutton practised what he had learnt, introducing new husbandry to Berwickshire and to what he refers to as a cursed country, an outpost of civilization, uncultivated with a lack of tools and skilled tradesmen. At the time, Slighhouses was described as an open field, with rig and furrow which Hutton removed and replaced with ditches.
With the benefit of the new husbandry, Slighhouses was described at the time by the author and advocate Robert Forsythe:
“The doctor began in earnest to improve a very wild and uncultivated piece of land; all of it was an open field, stones were to be split, fences were to be made at great expense being on the border of sheep country; drains also innumerable. The tillage also was all performed with the Suffolk plough. Dressing the land, drilling and hoeing turnips, rolling and all the operations of husbandry were done to a degree of neatness and gardenlike culture which in farming had not been seen before. Persons from every description came from every quarter to gratify their intellectual curiousty as well as to get information”.
He developed the Berwickshire husbandry of clean turnip fallows, neat ploughing and the introduction of cultivated grasses. This involved a crop rotation which was wheat, turnips after six months of fallow and barley undersown with grass and clover. He kept cattle and probably sheep. Hutton loved his cattle which were black polled, similar to the Aberdeen Angus breed.
‘Give me joy’
he wrote in a letter
‘this day is born unto my family a male child, mother is in a fair way of recovery. Though if the ladies were but capable of loving us men with half the affection that I have towards the cow and calves that happen to be under my nurture and admonition what a happy world we should have’.
There are no contemporary records for Nether Monynut and there are no old 18th century buildings, all appearing to have been converted sometime during the late 19th century. It is probable however that Nether Monynut being a hill farm maintained a sheep flock and lambs were fattened on turnips at Slighhouses.
Hutton endeavoured to improve Scottish agriculture. The Scots plough used at the time was heavy, clumsy, inefficient and wooden. In Norfolk he purchased what he described as a ‘high Suffolk’ plough, hired a ploughman and brought them both on a post chaise with him to Berwickshire. The neighbours were intrigued with this assortment of companions and belongings and no less with his attempt to plough with a horse in front and no driver, so he obviously caused a stir. Hutton probably worked with James Small at Blackadder Mount near Chirnside in Berwickshire, who designed the famous swing plough.
He experimented with plants and animal husbandry including animal nutrition and the dynamics of light, heat, soil chemistry and it was apparent that he had a growing interest in geology, and meteorology. He considered the relationship between climate, heat, and plant growth using insultated thermometers to investigate the relationship between temperature and latitude, the degree in Fahrenheit drop with each degree of latitude and the fall in temperature with evaporation. He attempted to predict harvest dates by relating the average temperature with the ripening corn, estimating that one degree drop in average temperature brought the harvested back by a week-and-a-half. He also experimented with soil fertility, using salt, seaweed, dung, coal ash and marl. He excavated his own marl pit at Slighhouses, which still exists, though it will be smaller now than it was when he worked it. Quantities commonly spread were:
“sometimes to the extent of 400 two-horse loads per acre”
Hutton proposed a system of agriculture which aimed to maintain soil fertility with mixed farming and rotations and the judicious use of fertilisers. He was conscious of political and economic need and that agriculture and wealth provide the stability of a nation.
James Hutton did not appear to publicise his innovations and was not recognised at the time for his contribution to agriculture, other than by the French Societe Royale d’Agriculture de Paris which elected him an ‘associe etranger’.
While at Slighhouses he toured the northeast of Scotland in 1764 with George Clerk-Maxwell. His geology and agricultural studies were inseparable.
Life as a Farmer
Hutton’s early life at Slighhouses was by all accounts hard and lonely. His decision to farm arising perhaps from some disappointing turn-of-events in his personal life:
“This squeamish, home-bred stomach of mine an’t truly reconciled to the bitter pill o’ disappointment”.
He suffered a loss of faith, and in correspondence refers obliquely to a love affair which he felt had ‘poisoned his chance of happiness’:
“…Now I am ee’n wedded and so must endeavour to restrain the wandering infidelities of the heart”.
This curious reference suggests that he was either married (but lived the life of a bachelor), or had a moral obligation. It is known that he had a son born out-of-marriage during his early twenties and before he started farming in c.1747
The initial state of the farm and lack of skilled labour frustrated him:
“A cursed country where one has to shape everything out of a block and to block everything out of a rock… I find myself already more that half transformed into a brute”
and he was not happy:
“everything conspires to break my heart but I shall die hard, I shall die like a cock or though even now I live like a capon”
and typically down-to-earth:
“I ain’t like in haste to wax to fat nor fart nor fling neither”.
Return to Edinburgh
Having done as much as he felt he could do to improve his farms, and perhaps the novelty and challenge had gone out of them, he returned to Edinburgh in 1768 to another challenge – the Forth and Clyde Canal. He had hoped to train his Norfolk ploughman as a farm manager, with the intention maybe of retaining a greater interest in it than he did. He let Slighhouses as a tenancy to a Joseph Mack, and Nether Monynut to his shepherd Robert Punton. In 1770, James Hutton built himself a house on St John’s Hill, Edinburgh, looking directly onto the Salisbury Crags.
Once in Edinburgh, he maintained his interest in farming and his farms and continued to undertake research into agriculture. It is apparent that he continued to use Slighhouses for his experiments, which included growing and brewing barley and he consulted widely on agricultural matters. He advised government on its role in agricultural affairs. He felt agriculture was too important to be left to the chance of market forces so he was at odds with Adam Smith, “the husbandman maintains the nation in all it’s ease, it’s affluence and it’s splendour”. He believed labourers could be made more efficient by careful training and supervision, proper tools and the division of labour. In his ‘Elements of Agriculture’ he records that in 1760 a hind (or female farm labourer) cost 8p per day and a ploughman £5 a year; however, labourers in Berwickshire were paid in kind.
His interest in agriculture continued to give impetus to his other studies. He experimented on developing a red dye for Turkey red using the plant Rubia tinctoria (madder), which he grew either at Slighhouses or Edinburgh. He pounded and sieved different parts of plants and then at different ages. The roots of one year old plants were best; they were bright and long lasting. He sent all this work to a manufacturer in Glasgow with success.
The Elements of Agriculture
James Hutton wrote his treatise on agriculture probably over some forty years. It was incomplete at his death in 1797 and never published. It is hand-written in two volumes of some 1,100 pages and held in the National Library of Scotland.
“I do not write in expectation of my book being popular I write for my pleasure on what has been in a manner the story of my life”.
He found writing his treatise “so complicated” and “difficult to treat in a systematic manner”, but he “endeavored to give the principle with the practice” of agriculture.
Similar to his other texts it is difficult to read.
The first volume deals with the generalities of farming at the time and the cultivation of cereals. In it he refers to agriculture as:
“This valuable art”
and that:
“Philosophers of husbandmen and husbandmen of philosophers by which a nation is made both powerful and happy”.
He was inspired by Jethro Tull as a youngster and he sought to “captivate the ignorant” on agriculture and methods of good husbandry. He went to Norfolk to “meet the most enlightened men in that profession”.
With reference to improvements at Slighhouses, he writes:
“Having first enclosed, drained and improved my farm, I wrote to my friends in Norfolk to send me a ploughman, they wrote that if I was resolved to have a ploughman from that country I must come for myself to fetch him for they could not persuade any man whom they should recommend to go to a country which was considered as banishment. I therefore went again to Norfolk”
where he remained for twelve months near Great Yarmouth. He also stayed in Suffolk where:
“plowmanship is found in the greatest state of perfection, more I believe than in any part of the world”.
James Hutton brought a ploughman back to Berwickshire. Once installed he wanted the ploughman to train youngsters, but the ploughman apparently was not either:
“willing or fit”.
The ploughman remained several years, but he neither:
“could manage the business of my farm nor the (land) management”.
“I gave up farming”
he writes:
“just at the period when the land was brought to such a state, as it might have been cultivated with pleasure and to good purpose”.
It is difficult to ascertain from this whether he felt that his job was done or he gave-up with disappointment.
He believed that:
“Man is not born with agriculture any more than in any other art”.
But:
“Now as man is by nature calculated to feed upon the produce of the earth, this is an art the most necessary to the species and the most interesting to nations”.
He goes on to say:
“Agriculture is an art by which man at his pleasure makes the earth yield those vegetable products for which he has occasion”;
and that:
“Agriculture is the effect of ingenuity and experience”.
He acknowledges that:
“It is necessary to collect the knowledge of individuals and experience of mankind”.
Profoundly he states:
“Science is founded upon the seeing of truth”.
He observed that decomposition and rocks make soil and that plants adapt to soil. “The harvest of the husbandmen depends on soil, climate, weed and labour”. He considered soils, temperature, climate making comparisons with different countries. He compliments agriculture in China and refers to France as “…one of the finest countries in Europe”.
He refers to:
“England at 7 million inhabitants has 6 acres for every mouth”.
In Scotland, he laments the lack of skill in the growing of oats:
“…so much oats as seldom ripens because of the lack of skill”
He records undertaking a number of experiments on the control of pests and diseases including the use of urine and brine to control smut in wheat. He deliberates on the importance of labour to the economy and the use of improved machinery (the plough, the roller, the hoe).
In it he describes:
“Intelligence – a spark of the divinity”
He says among the instruments that are employed in civilised society for improved nations the plough is certainly the most eminent. He makes observation on the soils in woods, the soil seems rested and in a fertile state.
Volume Two deals with animal reproduction and the art of breeding.
In it he discusses the making of butter and cheese and refers to Parmesan and that it should be made in Scotland. He refers to a cheese called Rasa which is blue and mouldy.
He doesn’t think hedgerows do crops any good and he refers to hedge planting as an expensive operation occupying too much ground. He does acknowledge that apart from shelter, and beautifying Scotland, hedgerows diminish the violence of the wind where trees require the mutual protection of each other. Enclosures he felt, should be by ditches and hurdles because pasture is important for fertile ground. He refers to Berwickshire as a country destitute of wood and the making of fencable enclosures will be of great benefit to land for the making of farmhouses. He is evidently very frugal.
The swede, the introduction of which is often attributed to James Hutton, was actually introduced after James Hutton stopped farming. He refers to it as being called the bage.
He ends his treatise with the discussion of the potato.
“How many parts of Scotland might be made the most precious orchards with the culture of the potato”.