Land of hope and Scotsmen!

There are the books which are thrown together in days and, in Auberon Waugh's phrase, "wrapped and sold like a ready-meal for the deep freezer."

And, at the other end of the shelf, there are the books that emerge from a lifetime's slowly marinating wisdom.

There is no doubt as to which category Peter Wormell's book Essex Farming 1900-2000 belongs. This is the loving, slowly accrued work of many decades.

Of course, one realises that the subject is almost calculated to send a section of the county population into catalepsy, while another, younger, supermarket-raised section are likely to say: "Farming, what's that?"

Yet that still leaves a surprisingly large sector who take a sufficient interest in our largest and most important industry to drool at the appearance of this book.

Many of us droolers are not even involved directly with agriculture, but mere back-seat farmers.

It would be hard to think of anybody with more of a right to claim this subject as his own than Peter Wormell. Even before he had written a word of this massive work, his qualifications spoke volumes. The scion of generations of Essex farmers, he has spent more than 50 years as a horny-hands-on practical farmer.

At the same time, he has been the Essex County Standard's agricultural correspondent since 1947, and editor-in-chief for 11 years of the Farmer's Handbook, that indispensable agricultural implement.

He has talked grain prices with uncounted sons of the soil (some of them farmers and farm-workers in Victorian times), patted hundreds of Friesians on the snout, cursed scores of Essex droughts. He has also harvested the archives over 30 years.

Essex Farming is authoritative and encyclopaedic, but it is also highly entertaining. Even if you aim at a scholarly log, you cannot write about farmers over a century and not tell a colourful tale.

The first revelation is just how successful Essex Man is when he dons a smock and sticks a straw in his mouth. That even includes Farmer Giles of Basildon. "Essex farming provided a contribution to the 20th century that no other county could equal," Peter Wormell writes.

Aside from the Essex pig, Beauty of Essex potato, and Essex Red Clover, the county has managed to break the world wheat yield record, and field 10 out of a total 54 Masters of the Worshipful Company of Farmers.

True, some of this success wasn't down to native Essex men at all, but to immigrants, notably the wave of Scottish growers who settled here to take advantage of low land prices at the end of the 19th century. But in Essex we have a knack for turning even a hairy oat-eater into one of our own in no time at all.

The opening of the century finds south Essex still an area of farms and market-gardens. The old place still felt overwhelmingly rural. Even Southend remained an agricultural town until well into the 20th century.

Donkeys and pigs grazed just off the High Street and the annual fruit show of the Associated Fruit Growers of Essex was held in the Kursaal. Three farmers' banks opened in the town as part of the City's drive to turn farming from a bartering into a cash-based business.

Yet all was not well. Things, in the most literal sense, did not look good. Thomas Whitmore stood at the top of Rettendon church tower, looked towards Benfleet and Basildon and estimated that around 22,000 acres of farmland was fast returning to its wild state.

It was farming's problems in the county that opened the gate to a legion of bungalows and housing estates.

The horrors of World War One actually helped agriculture. Essex farmers, who on the whole are not temperamentally disposed to livestock, turned wholesale to cattle-raising.

Essex bovines supplied the Army with much of the bully beef that sustained the trenches though farmers booted the beasts off their fields as soon as possible once the war had ended.

The mechanisation of farming arrived with a vengeance after the 1914-18 war. Lincolnshire apart, Essex is the tractor county par excellence, with the bulk of production concentrated in Dagenham and subsequently Basildon.

Some of this has to do with Henry Ford I's own family background in farming and desire to relieve the back-breaking, heart-breaking grind of agricultural work. But much of it also has to do with the county's engineering inventiveness.

Thousands of miles of British ditches and land-drains were bored by the famous Darby Walking Digger, manufactured in Wickford and so-called because it moved at a walking pace, albeit that of a shire horse on the way to the gelder's shop.

After the torrential rains of September 1958, an even weirder machine appeared in the hard-hit fields between Battlesbridge and Crays Hill. This was a Claas Bogmaster. As ungainly as its name and unlikely to become anybody's pin-up, but farmers in the area still retain a fond memory of the salvage work it did on the waterlogged fields. The Bogmaster had actually been devised for paddy-field farmers.

The great rains were just a hiccup in the onward progress of Essex into becoming the breadbasket of the English counties. Barley declined when the Scots (yes, them again) developed their own strain of malting grain. Wheat, once derided as a "lazy man's crop" and a "dirty" (that is, weed-infested) crop, quickly took over.

This being farming, there were plenty of moaning McDonalds ready to mutter about over-production of wheat, especially when the sheer weight of this particular grain pushed out the walls of ancient barns.

Local agronomist George Barrows refuted them with scorn, calling such views: "about as valid as that once held about steam trains - namely that the human body would not be able to withstand speeds much in excess of 60mph."

When a thrilling sounding Essex Wheat Conference was set up in 1969, so many farmers turned up at the Marks Tey hotel that some had to be turned away.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer turned away from a meeting, so the conference not only emphasised local enthusiasm for wheat growing, but became a lot more exciting than it sounded.

Peter Wormell tries to sound an upbeat note throughout, but on the whole the book can't be said to have an entirely happy ending. The county has suffered from Dutch elm disease, and the BSE scare. The last livestock market has just closed.

Still, there are happy signs, too. Trees are being planted as never before and "the soil of Essex, at the end of the century, was in better heart than it had ever been before."

Above all, the resourcefulness of Essex farmers continues unabated. If one market closes, another is found. The latest item to be exploited is the Essex landscape itself.

As Peter Wormell writes, Essex can boast "many pristine sites without the intrusion of pylons and poles."

Thanks to this, he points out, Essex farmers are now reaping one of the most profitable crops of all, in the shape of film and TV locations. God speed the Essex plough - and the movie-camera dolly!

Essex Farming 1900-2000 by Peter Wormell is published by Abberton Books, Langenhoe Hall, Colchester CO5 7NA at £24.95.

Produce on display - the Essex Commercial Horticultural show was held in Southend in 1948

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.