Tour Scotland video of tractor ploughing in rural Perthshire, Scotland. After recently harvesting Barley the Scottish farmer is now preparing the field for potato planting.
The Highland Potato Famine was a period of 19th century Highland and Scottish history, 1846 to roughly 1856, over which the agricultural communities of the Hebrides and the western Scottish Highlands saw their potato crop repeatedly devastated by potato blight. It was part of the wider food crisis facing Northern Europe caused by potato blight during the mid 1840s, whose most famous manifestation is the Great Irish Famine, but compared to its Irish counterpart it was much less extensive, and took many fewer lives, prompt and major charitable efforts by the rest of the United Kingdom ensured that there was relatively little starvation. The terms on which charitable relief was given, however, led to destitution and malnutrition amongst its recipients. A government enquiry could suggest no short term solution other than reduction of the population of the area at risk by emigration to Canada or Australia. Highland landlords organised the emigration of about 16,000 of their tenants, chiefly to Canada; many highlanders made their own way to other destinations in the Scottish Lowlands or further afield and it is estimated that about a third of the population of the western Highlands and the Hebrides migrated from the area between 1841 and 1861.
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