Throughout the 18th century, landowners all over Europe became increasingly interested in new ways of farming. The population had grown and more people had moved to the towns, so ways of increasing the food supply had to be found. One early development was four-course crop rotation, in which fields were planted with different crops each year, a "greedy" crop alternating with one that nourished the soil: turnips, barley, clover, wheat." Before this, farmers had been forced to let fields lie fallow, or idle, while the soil recovered.
The old smallholding system also came to be regarded as inefficient, and open fields, with strips of land belonging to different owners, were replaced by enclosed areas. In many cases common land, which many people needed for survival, was enclosed too under the Enclosure Acts between 1759 and 1801.
The Agricultural Revolution was accelerated further by inventions such as Jethro Tull's speed drill in 1701, which put an end to the old, haphazard practice of broadcast sowing by hand.