Ireland was also known as the Emerald Isle. From east to west and north to south, the entire island was covered in green. The climate was mild, waterways crisscrossed the land, and the pastures were vast, making it exceptionally suited to livestock farming.
To restrict Irish wool exports, the London Parliament even passed laws forbidding the import of live Irish cattle. After William III defeated James II, the lands of Irish nobles who had once supported James II were "confiscated." Land controlled by the Irish themselves amounted to only 14 percent, falling to 7 percent twenty years later. By 1775, only around 5 percent of Irish land remained in Irish hands.
At the time, Parliament also passed a "Livestock Act," forbidding Catholics from owning horses worth more than five pounds sterling, though it did not ban them from raising cattle and pigs. But agriculture and animal husbandry alone could not drive up rents. The primary purpose of the Enclosure Movement was that wool brought greater profits than farming. Nobles and newly risen nobles could pay higher rents and drive away the farmers who had originally rented the land to cultivate it. British landlords in Ireland were likewise constrained by the Woollens Act and the Livestock Act.
Still, people always found a "way." Landowners generally did not live in Ireland. They leased out their land through middlemen, collected a sum of rent in advance, and then washed their hands of it.
The middlemen leased to other middlemen, and after layer upon layer of exploitation, rents were already quite high by the time the land reached Irish tenant farmers. They also divided the land into tiny plots. American farmers had large tracts of land and even needed horses to pull their plows, which lowered their cultivation costs.
High rents, high planting costs,