UNPROFITABLE FARMING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 November 1939, Page 3

UNPROFITABLE FARMING

EXAMPLES IN GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA. i I In his address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Sir Thomas Middleton, the noted English authority, gave some remarkable examples of lhe unprofitableness, of agriculture, not only in Great Britain but in the United States. For instance, in lhe well-farmed area df north-east Scotland, on a group of farms averaging about 450 acres (with 350-375 acres arable) and employing about £lO capital per acre, the farmer's income, after allowing 4 per cent on capital, has only averaged £l4O a year over the past nine years. Again in a recent Cambridge survey in the eastern counties, covering 200 farms averaging 163 acres, the average earnings of the farmer, after allowing 4 per cent on capital, were shown in 1938 to be less than £2 a week. Nor are even these earnings cash; for in all cases they include the rental-value of the house and the value of produce consumed by the household. In the United States the farmers, after meeting necessary outgoings and wages for themselves at the same rate as for their hired men, earned in 1929 a bare 3.3 per cent return on their invested capital. In each of the three following years they earned less than nothing on it, the annual returns being minus 0.7, minus 2.8 and minus 4.2 per cent respectively.