Throughout his reign, George III was keenly interested in improving crops and stock-breeding. In the 1760s, he was restoring his estates (including two farms) in Richmond and Kew, and by the mid-1780s he was farming in the Little Park in Windsor. His experiments in breeding Merino sheep to improve wool quality were supervised by Sir Joseph Banks, and public auctions were used to dispose of surplus stock. In the early 1790s, he took rangership of Richmond and Windsor Great Parks, employing Nathaniel Kent as Land Agent. In the following decade, he would become assiduous in his frequent inspections of the parkland and farms in Windsor Great Park.

Such dedication is reflected in the King's substantial collection of books on agricultural improvement. Originally listed in the Kew Library catalogues of 1780 and 1785, they were transferred to Windsor in the 1790s, inserted as an extra leaf in the Windsor catalogue. Many of these books are now at Cambridge University Library, since they were gifted to the library of the School of Agriculture in 1927. Others, like the present volume, remain at the Royal Library.

Concerning the improvement of pasture, this book has been annotated in the King's hand: 'Sainfoin is good green food for Cattle'; 'If the Hay is stained by Showery Weather in making, mixing a Peck of Salt with a Ton of Hay will make the Cattle feed on it'; 'Cattle thrive better on Lucerne or Sainfoin that [sic] on the best Meadow Grass.' Each provides the salient point of paragraphs, presumably to speed up reference to the volume by a practising farmer.

Bibliographic description
[14], 320 p.

Binding description
Brown calf, rebacked.