The first president was Sir John Sinclair, and the first secretary Arthur Young, with a salary of L400 a year, which he thought insufficient.[505] The first task of the new board was that of preparing statistical accounts of English agriculture, and it was intended to take in hand the commutation of tithes, which would have been a great boon to farmers, with whom the prevailing system of collecting tithes was very unpopular; but the Primate's opposition stopped this. The board appointed lecturers, procured a reward for Elkington for his draining system, encouraged Macadam in his plans for improving roads, and Meikle the inventor of the thrashing machine, and obtained the removal of taxes on draining tiles, and other taxes injurious to agriculture. It also recommended the allotment system, and Sinclair desired 3 acres and a cow for every industrious cottager. During the abnormally high prices of provisions from 1794-6, the quartern loaf in London in 1795 being 1s. 6d., though next year it dropped to 7-3/4d.,[506] the board made experiments in making bread with substitutes for wheat, which resulted in a public exhibition of eighty different sorts of bread. Its efforts were generally followed by increased zeal among agriculturists; but Sinclair, an able but impetuous man,[507] appears to have taken things too much into his own hands and pushed them too speedily. Financial difficulties came, chiefly owing to the cost of the surveys, which had been hurried on with undue haste and often with great carelessness, the surveyors sometimes being men who knew nothing of the subject. Sinclair was deposed from the presidency in 1798, and succeeded by Lord Somerville. He again was succeeded by Lord Carrington, under whose presidency the board offered premiums (the first of L200), owing to the high price of wheat and consequent distress, for essays on the best means of converting certain portions of grass land into tillage without exhausting the soil, and of returning the same to grass, after a certain period, in an improved state, or at least without injury. The general report, based on the information derived from these essays, states that no high price of corn or temporary distress would justify the ploughing up of old meadows or rich pastures, and that on certain soils well adapted to grass age improves the quality of the pasture to a degree which no system of management on lands broken up and laid down can equal. In spite of this, the cupidity of landowners and farmers, when wheat was a guinea a bushel or at prices near it, led to the ploughing up of much splendid grass land, which was never laid down again until, perhaps in recent years, owing to the low price of grain; so that some of the land at all events has, owing to bad times, returned to the state best suited to it.