The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the improvements of the lowland farmland and the beginning of a transformation of Scottish agriculture from one of the most backward into what is to become the most modern and productive system in Europe.

The traditional system of agriculture in lowland Scotland had existed unchanged for hundreds of years.

In many ways it is a totally rural economy, the land being worked by the cottars on the centuries-old runrig system of subsistence farming.The Agricultural Revolution leads directly to what is increasingly becoming known as the Lowland Clearances, when hundreds of thousands of cottars and tenant farmers from central and southern Scotland will, in many cases, be forcibly moved from the farms and small holdings they have occupied for hundreds of years.