Downton Abbey Economics

For those who watch Downton Abbey, the Post had a piece on its economics yesterday.

It's all good, but I've a couple concerns.  Apparently the estate includes several thousand acres of land which are farmed either by tenants or by the estate.  This season a long-time tenant died and Mary and Tom were going to take over the farm, since the tenant was in arrears on his rent.  The Earl responded to the tenant's son's appeal that the son take over the farm, and loaned him money to pay the arrears.

From this episode, one assumes that when the estate farms the land, it has either sharecroppers or wage laborers doing the work.  Not sure that's right though.  I'm mentally comparing the picture with the post-bellum South, with its mixture of cash tenants, share tenants, and day laborers.  Not sure how it corresponds or if it does.  To the extent the estate wants to take over the land, it's assuming a bigger risk from weather and market factors.  Weather in England may be less extreme than in the US, and I don't know what the market for wheat is doing post-war.

Continuing on farming, back during WWI Lady Sybil learned to drive a tractor being used on one of the farms.  I'm not sure the context: whether it was the tractor of an independent farmer, one owned by a tenant, or one owned by the estate.  At any rate, expenditures for capital investment like tractors were a big hurdle for tenants, so I wonder about the financing of the tractor.  (I suspect Fellowes threw in the tractor just for dramatic purposes, without intending any economic analysis.  But then, that may be true of the whole series.)