Agricultural History Review, Volume 44 Part 1 (1996), pp. 21–34

The authors take up Patrick O'Brien's challenge of twenty years ago to introduce into agricultural history some hard data on production and output. They present the findings of a pilot project of the availability of farm records for the period 1700-1835. The introduction restates the challenge, after which the paper falls into three main parts and a conclusion. Part one is a brief sunmaary of the current progress in assessing specific aspects of farm production, output, and productivity over the long eighteenth century; part two sunmaarizes the survival rate of English 6ann records from 1700-1835; and part three is a sensitivity analysis of the value of these records. The conclusion reformulates the challenge into a realistic wider project to open up the hidden data of English agricultural production. 

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