The full effect of this momentous change was not to be felt for a generation, but the immediate effect was an agricultural panic apparently justified by falling prices.  In 1850 wheat averaged 40s. 3d. and in 1851 38s. 6d.  On the other hand, stock farmers were doing well.  But on the corn lands the prices of the protection era had to come down; many farms were thrown up, some arable turned into pasture; distress was widespread.  Owing to the depressed state of agriculture in 1850, the Times sent James Caird on a tour through England, and one of the most important conclusions arrived at in his account of his tour is, that owing to protection, the majority of landowners had neglected their land; but another cause of neglect was that the great body of English landlords knew nothing of the management of their estates, and committed it to agents who knew little more and merely received the rents.  The important business of being a landowner is the only one for which no special training is provided.  Many of the landlords, however, then, as now, were unable to improve their estates if they desired to do so, as they were hopelessly encumbered, and the expense of sale was almost prohibitive.  The contrast between good and bad farmers was more marked in 1850 than to-day, the efforts of the Royal Agricultural Society to raise the general standard of farming had not yet borne much fruit.  In many counties, side by side, were farmers who used every modern improvement, and those who still employed the methods of the eighteenth century:  on one farm wheat producing 40 bushels an acre, threshed by steam at a cost of 3s. 6d., on the next 20 bushels to the acre threshed by the flail at a cost of 9s.[639]

Drainage in the counties where it was needed had made considerable progress, the removal of useless hedgerows often crowded with timber, that kept the sun from the crops and whose roots absorbed much of the nourishment of the soil, was slowly extending, but farm-buildings almost everywhere were defective.  ’The inconvenient ill-arranged hovels, the rickety wood and thatch barns and sheds devoid of every known improvement for economizing labour, food, and manure, which are to be met with in every county in England, are a reproach to the landlords in the eyes of all good farmers.’[640] The farm-buildings of Belgium, Holland, France, and the Rhenish Provinces were much superior.  In parts of England indeed no progress seems to have been made for generations at this date.  Thousands of acres of peat moss in Lancashire were unreclaimed, and many parts of the Fylde district were difficult even to traverse.  Even in Warwickshire, in the heart of England, between Knowle and Tamworth, instead of signs of industry and improvement were narrow winding lanes leading to nothing, traversed by lean pigs and rough cattle, broad copse-like hedges, small and irregular fields of couch, amidst which straggled the stalks of some smothered cereal; these with gipsy encampments and the occasional sound of the poacher’s gun from woods and thickets around were the characteristics of the district.[641]