Agricultural History Review, Volume 73 Part 2 (2025), pp. 155–178

Advances in manuring underpinned agricultural improvement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1900 standardized farming methods had been widely adopted. Regional practices did persist, however. One such was using raw fish as a field dressing. This study reveals that the practice was already widespread around the north Atlantic littoral by c.1750. The use of fish as manure, and the quantities of fish caught for this purpose, increased significantly over the next 150 years. In tracing the history of ‘fishing’ fields, new light is shone on the economic and agrarian imperatives and knowledge exchange that drove agricultural improvement during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; on the tensions that could be engendered when different parties competed for the same resource; and on the emerging sense of anxiety over the environmental consequences of more intensive farming and fishing practices that began to be voiced towards the end of the nineteenth century.