page_title: George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont
section_title: Agriculture
hierarchical_section_title: George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont / Agriculture
caption_attribution_description: English: Sussex breed cows seen near Petworth, West Sussex, England.
context_page_description: George O'Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont FRS of Petworth House in Sussex and Orchard Wyndham in Somerset, was a British peer, a major landowner and a great art collector. He was interested in the latest scientific advances. He was an agriculturist and a friend of the agricultural writer Arthur Young, and was an enthusiastic canal builder who invested in many commercial ventures for the improvement of his estates. He played a limited role in politics.
  He was a great patron of art and the painter J. M. W. Turner lived for a while at his Sussex seat of Petworth House. Several other painters including John Constable, C. R. Leslie, George Romney, the sculptor John Flaxman, and other talented artists received commissions from Wyndham, who filled his house with valuable works of art. The earl was a sponsor of the Petworth Emigration Scheme intended to relieve rural poverty caused by overpopulation. Generous and hospitable, blunt and eccentric, the earl was in his day a very prominent figure in English society. Charles Greville assessed him as "immensely rich and his munificence was equal to his wealth" and wrote that "in his time Petworth was like a great inn."
context_section_description: The Reverend Arthur Young stayed at Petworth House while conducting his surveys of English agriculture. The earl established a pedigree herd of Sussex cattle from the local breed which was commended by Young who wrote that they "must be unquestionably ranked among the best of the kingdom".  A herd descended from these animals is maintained at Stag Park at the present day. Devon and Hereford cattle were also kept, together with crossbreds. Different breeds of sheep were tried and exotic Tibetan Shaul goats, which  produced fine wool for hatters.
  Stag Park model farm was created in the northern part of Petworth Park on land cleared of scrub and gorse, consisting of between 700 and 800 acres divided into fields and drained. Land previously used for producing wood fuel could then be released for food production as wood had been replaced by coal delivered by the new canal system. Crop rotations including turnips, tares, wheat, barley, oats and grass were introduced. Potatoes were grown at Petworth and rhubarb as medicine. More unusually Young describes opium production at Petworth, with juices from the incised poppy heads being scraped into earthenware bowls and dried in the sun. The 1797 crop was the largest grown in England and was said to be purer than imported opium.
  The 24,000-acre estates in Yorkshire at Wressle and Leconfield in the East Riding, Catton and Seamer in the North Riding, and Spofforth and Tadcaster in the West Riding were also greatly improved with £26,000 spent on drainage and fencing alone between 1797 and 1812.
  As well as breeding horses and introducing improved machinery, the earl was keen to continue using draught-oxen when they were going out of favour elsewhere. Young records that by experiment traditional wooden yokes were found to be superior to horse-style collars.
  John Ellman, writing in The History, Antiquities and Topography of the County of Sussex by Thomas Walker Horsfield (1835), writes of Wyndham:
  Horses—This county must not boast of their breed. The Earl of Egremont, with a spirit of liberality which pervades all his actions, gives to farmers, in the neighbourhood of Petworth, the opportunity of breeding from his valuable stud; his lordship also affords the eastern part of the county the same opportunity, by giving the use of one of his best bred horses to Mr. Brown, the venerable training groom at Lewes; his lordship also gives annual premiums to the breeders of the best colts, shewn at Egdean fair, near Petworth.
  In 1800, Wyndham bought land at Houghton, Sussex, where he developed chalk pits, which in 1808 Arthur Young reported as producing 40,000 tonnes (40,000,000 kg) annually. A canal cut was dug from the River Arun to allow chalk to be moved by barge to lime kilns on higher reaches of the river system, including one at Haslingbourne, south of Petworth.
caption: Sussex cows at Stag Park
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