Alternative Agriculture

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.