BRITAIN’S FARMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 August 1938, Page 3

BRITAIN’S FARMS

STABILITY THE GREAT NEED PRODUCTION IMPORTANCE IN PEACE AND WAR. At no time during the present generation has more intelligent interest been taken in British agriculture than now, writes Sir John Russell, director of Rothamsted Experimental Station, in the “Daily Telegraph" and “Morning Post.’ My distinguished predecessor, Sir Daniel Hall, once told me that in his early days he went to the old Board of Agriculture to try to enlist the interest of the high officials in agricultural research; he was received politely enough, but was coldly informed that British agriculture was dead and the business of the board was to give it a decent funeral. Events have shown that it was not only not dead, but very persistently alive, and it remains to this day our largest single industry, and by common consent it would become of supreme importance if ever war should come upon us.

This being so, why is it that one hears so continually about the plight of agriculture? The reason lies in the fact that agriculture differs fundamentally from other industries and it is extremely difficult to reconcile the needs of agriculture and the needs of industry generally. The townsman always hopes for cheap food, and the farmer hopes for high prices. The townsman thinks in one set of terms and the countryman thinks in another. The differences between agricultural production and factory production are very wide. = NOT CONTROLLABLE. In the first place agricultural production is not entirely controllable; the choice of crop and the yield are both limited by soil and climate, and within these limits yields vary from year'to year according to the weather. Proper management reduces the variations, but there is no indication that they can ever be Wholly avoided. No plan of. production, therefore, can ever be rigid’; it must be left sufficiently elastic to allow for the vagaries of the weather and the influences of local conditions.

Further, agricultural production is slow, and a great part of it cannot by any known means be speeded up. Wheat must be sown in winter or early spring, and it is not ready for harvesting until the following July or August. Milk cannot be obtained from a cow until her calf is born, and this requires a waiting period of nine or ten months, which cannot by any known means be shortened. Lambs do not take so long to appear, but they are born only in the late winter or spring. Pigs are the quickest to reproduce themselves, but even here the period of gestation is four months. If, therefore a plan involves any contingency or emergency measures, full allowance must be made for this great and irreducible time lag. These defficulties apply everywhere. There are in addition two others of special importance in this country. THE BEST-SIZED UNIT. Our peace-time organisation of agriculture accords best with a farming unit of about 100 to 300 acres; holdings of this size tend to increase in number, while larger or smaller holdings tend to decrease in number. The unit has the obvious disadvantage of not allowing full use of machinery or of rapid change of method; it is akin to the old craftsman's method in industry or the old type of individual shopkeeping. Unlike these, however, agriculture has not succumbed to the operations of the large-scale business organisation well supplied with capital; there are large farmers —some, indeed, have converted themselves into companies as a matter of convenience—but there is no large-scale or chain farming comparable with the industrial and commercial operations of companies. Farmers are rather proud of this. It is the consequence partly of the imperfect control of production both in time and quantity, and partly of the need to treat each animal, each field, and each day as an individual rather than on standard lines. It has developed a sturdy individuality in the British farmer. The other difficulty is much more serious and no certain way of overcoming it has yet been found, though several are being attempted. One of the consequences of the dependence of agricultural production on natural conditions is that the machine is not nearly so potent in farming as it is in manufacturing. There is, therefore, a closer connection between wages rates and cost of production in agriculture than in industry. WAGES AND PRICES After the war Agrrcunural Wages boards were set up in England and Wales to fix minimum wages for agricultural workers. The wages fixed

were higher than those received by most of the overseas farm workers and more than corresponded with the difference in efficiency; in consequence there arose a disparity between the costs of food produced here and the open world prices. It is this disparity that lies at the root of the whole agricultural problem. Various methods have been adopted by successive Governments for dealing with it. They may be briefly summarised as follows: — 1. Marketing boards, set up with the intention of overcoming the serious defects of the old and wasteful methods of individual selling of all farm produce; 2. Contracts of various kinds, to peg prices at a point below which they must not fall; 3. The land fertility scheme, the aim of which is to raise the fertility of the land so that higher outputs can be obtained. For all of these methods considerable success can be claimed. The Marketing boards have brought system and order where before a good deal of con-* fusion prevailed, and though on occascions their restrictions have been more in the public eye than their good results, nevertheless they have much useful work to their credit and they are accumulating valuable experience. The pegging of certain prices of farm produce was obviously necessary in view of the fixing of wages by official bodies and the fixing of prices of the farmers’ raw materials by the organisations concerned.

MILK, BEET, AND PIBS. The best-known contracts are for milk, sugar beet, and pigs for bacon factories, but the wheat quota scheme is in effect also a contract. Here the farmer knows what he is going to receive for his produce up to the specified quantity; he can, therefore, work out exactly how much he can afford to spend on labour, fertilisers, and feeding stuffs, and so he can attain a higher level of production than when he is producing entirely on the chance that, prices may be good, but always with the fear at the back of his mind that they will be bad. The land fertility scheme . was designed to deal with two long period problems of soil fertility which always tend to be postponed in times of difficulty but, if left too long, finally cause serious trouble —soil acidity, and phosphate exhaustion. If only peace could be assured these methods would, I feel convinced, greatly improve the prosperity of our agriculture. The extension of the contract system to all the major farm products would give a degree of certainty to farming that would justify the more intensive production which is at present too risky for most farmers to undertake. Still further improvement would be effected .by making the contracts run, not for one year as at present, but for the proper farm unit of time, the rotation—a period of four or five years—and with sliding scale clauses to deal with variations in rates of wages and costs of fertilisers and feeding stuffs.

This long-drawn-out unit of time leads to all kinds, of complications on the farm. In particular it makes changes very slow and difficult.

VITALLY IMPORTANT. A corn-growing farm cannot change over to milk production under a period of three of four years even if abundant capital is available, and if it is not, the change takes longer. Stability is of vital importance on the farm, and the recognition of this necessity makes farmers cautions of introducing changes and puts on the would-be improver the need for showing how to introduce the proposed improvement with the minimum of disturbance 4o the productive power of the farm. It is this that makes a prosperous peace-time agriculture so vitally important to the success of a war-time agriculture. For there would have to be great changes; much grass land would have to be ploughed up and sown down in wheat; other land would be used for producing much more butter and .other fats, but all this would require men, horses, or tractors, implements, seed and fertilisers; it would also necessitate changes in other directions. These changes would be difficult enough in peace time; they would be much more difficult in war time. But if the peace-time agriculture is fairly prosperous the workers arc more numerous, the land is in good, fertile condition, supplies of seed are at hand, implements are likely to be in good order, and horses or tractors available. So can the change be effective when the need comes. Of course, a good deal of preliminary work would still be necessary to draw up a carefully worked-out plan and carry it into the counties and on the farms so as to ensure the pro-

duction of foods known to be necessary. But no plan can produce food unless the necessary materials are available on the farm, and they are not likely to be available in ample quantities unless the normal agriculture is sufficiently prosperous. ,