The late nineteenth century brought great changes throughout Europe. Country areas were depopulated as cities attracted labour to work in their factories, lured by the empty promise of material comforts. Food markets became dominated by larger suppliers and merchants, and smaller farms with low yields found themselves unable to compete. Although mechanisation was developing rapidly, machinery cost money, and smaller farms were unable to benefit from the productivity improvements occurring on larger farms.

One substantial improvement that many could use was better drainage of arable land. Although hardly technological, as most land drains are made from baked clay, many areas across Europe had suffered waterlogging of their best fields during the winter. Land drains dug into the field to draw water to a ditch at the edge significantly increased areas under cultivation, as well as crop yields.

More substantial drainage works had already turned large areas of bog and marsh into productive farmland, throughout the Netherlands, and in areas like the Fens in England during the decades prior to 1820. Both remain among the largest civil engineering projects undertaken in Europe.

Steam engines came into agricultural use in the late nineteenth century. At first they were largely static, but from the 1860s they became self-propelled, now known as traction engines and still a popular feature of country fairs. Teams travelled the countryside hiring out the services of their steam engine for threshing and ploughing.

After the First World War, internal combustion engines replaced steam, and the first real tractors came into use.

Heinrich Vogeler’s Farmer Ploughing from the period 1930-42 shows a tractor with an internal combustion engine and its own tracks, towing a heavy plough.

Lighter wheeled tractors became popular during the middle of the twentieth century. Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, made in the period 1939-44, is its own lesson in agricultural history. In the distance, on one of the rolling chalk downs in the south of England, are three horse-drawn ploughs tackling some of the steeper ground.

With a high proportion of men serving in the armed forces, the two tractors in the foreground are being driven and tended by young women, dubbed the Women’s Land Army. The further of the two tractors is drawing a lighweight wheeled plough, better suited to this land.

In 1942, when Frances Hodgkins was living in the south-west of England, at Corfe Castle in Dorset, she painted this gouache of Broken Tractor showing the mechanical disarray that overtook many farmyards during the twentieth century, as their ageing farm machinery fell beyond economic repair.

With networks of railways and later roads reaching deep into many country districts, agricultural produce could be transported in bulk and travel from producer to consumer in a matter of hours. Early morning trains carrying milk to cities became widespread.

JMW Turner was among the first painters to capture this in his Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway in 1844. This pioneering railway connected London with rich farming country across the south of England, down into western counties, eventually reaching Cornwall in 1859, fifteen years after Turner had completed this painting.

Giuseppe De Nittis here shows The Passing of a Train through productive French countryside between 1869-80.

The winners here though were those farmers who were already prospering. Smallholders and others who still farmed using traditional methods were left behind, in increasing poverty and neglect.