The motion was carried by 101 to 26. By its charter the board consisted of a president, 16 ex-officio and 30 ordinary members, with honorary and corresponding members. It was not a Government department in the modern sense of the term, but a society for the encouragement of agriculture, as the Royal Society is for the encouragement of science. It was, indeed, supported by parliamentary grants, receiving a sum of £3,000 a year, but the Government had only a limited control over its affairs through the ex-officio members, among whom were the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Lord Chancellor, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Speaker.
The first president was Sir John Sinclair, and the first secretary Arthur Young, with a salary of £400 a year, which he thought insufficient.[505] The first task of the new board was that of preparing statistical accounts of English agriculture, and it was intended to take in hand the commutation of tithes, which would have been a great boon to farmers, with whom the prevailing system of collecting tithes was very unpopular; but the Primate's opposition stopped this. The board appointed lecturers, procured a reward for Elkington for his draining system, encouraged Macadam in his plans for improving roads, and Meikle the inventor of the thrashing machine, and obtained the removal of taxes on draining tiles, and other taxes injurious to agriculture. It also recommended the allotment system, and Sinclair desired 3 acres and a cow for every industrious cottager. During the abnormally high prices of provisions from 1794-6, the quartern loaf in London in 1795 being 1s. 6d., though next year it dropped to 7-3/4d.,[506] the board made experiments in making bread with substitutes for wheat, which resulted in a public exhibition of eighty different sorts of bread. Its efforts were generally followed by increased zeal among agriculturists; but Sinclair, an able but impetuous man,[507] appears to have taken things too much into his own hands and pushed them too speedily.
Financial difficulties came, chiefly owing to the cost of the surveys, which had been hurried on with undue haste and often with great carelessness, the surveyors sometimes being men who knew nothing of the subject.