Agriculture - British Farming Systems

AGRICULTURE - BRITISH FARMING SYSTEMS British farming is characteristically an affair of small capitalist businesses employing paid labour. The following table (Table IV.) of the holdings in England and Wales shows the apportion ment of such holdings with respect to their size.

Characteristically, too, the farms are tenancies held under yearly agreements, though the tenant is largely protected from disturbance by the Agricultural Act. The landowner provides the permanent equipment of the farm-buildings, gates and fencing, water supply, drainage. The landowner also is responsible for re pairs to the fabric, but minor improvements of which he will re main possessed are generally carried out on the basis of the land owner finding materials—timber for fencing, bricks, stone, gates, drain tiles, seeds for permanent pasture, etc., and the tenant find ing the labour. The landowner's capital has been estimated to amount on the average to £3 r per acre, the tenants to £ I 2–L r 5 per acre, and the average rent to 3is. per acre. Under such a system the entry upon and leaving of a farm, at whatever date, necessitates a considerable adjustment of account between land lord and tenant, since the farm must be left as a going concern. These adjustments were formerly regulated entirely by custom and though they are now governed by the various Agricultural Holdings Acts (consolidated in 1923), custom is recognized and still plays a large part. The basis of the Act is that the outgoing tenant is entitled to compensation from the landowner for all improvements he has effected, the amount of compensation be ing determined by the value of the improvement to the incoming tenant. For certain types of permanent improvement, e.g., build ings, plantations of fruit trees, the tenant is not entitled to com pensation unless the consent of the landlord has previously been obtained. The purpose of this exclusion is to prevent the tenant from committing the landowner to payment for an improvement which the latter might not be able to realize. For example the improvement effected by planting land with fruit or hops might be valued as high as oo an acre, with embarrassment to the landowner if he had to pay out this sum on the determination of the tenancy without any assurance of being able to find a tenant willing to pay an adequate rent for it. An exception is made in the case of holdings let as market gardens. Here general legis lative sanction has been given to what was known as the "Evesham custom." The tenant possesses the right of free sale of the im provements he has made, e.g., beds of asparagus, fruit plantations, etc., but must find the purchaser, the landowner being obliged to accept the tenant proposed by the outgoing tenant, who has made his own bargain for the improvement with the new tenant.

In ordinary cases the negotiations with regard to improvements proceed between the outgoing and the incoming tenant, in whose agreement with the landowner is a clause that he shall pay what ever compensation is due to the outgoer. Each tenant appoints a valuer who between them prepare an agreed valuation of the tenant right, there being provision for an arbitrator in cases of dis pute. The account includes the cost of cultivations carried out before leaving the tenancy standing crops and manurial residues whether of fertilizers applied or purchased feeding stuffs con sumed during the latter years of the tenancy. But as farms are vacated at different dates in different parts of the country, though most commonly at Michaelmas or Lady Day, custom still plays a large part in determining both what things are the subjects of compensation and the basis of assessment.

Tenancy.—The British tenancy system possesses many ad vantages. The handicap that farming is under as compared with other industries lies in the large amount of fixed capital involved in comparison with turnover and in the lag that exists between expenditure and returns. For the farmer who has to own his farm this implies a considerable degree of credit, and in foreign coun tries it has generally been found necessary to give some State support to landbanks or other long term credit organizations which will take the burden of the capital outlay on land and buildings. The short term credits required for the conduct of the business proper are supplied by co-operative associations or the banks. Otherwise mortgages rule and mortgages have universally proved destructive to the farmers whenever a run of bad seasons occurs. In Britain the landowner has supplied the cheap capital the in dustry requires f or its permanent equipment, and the banking system so far pervades the community that it can furnish a not unreasonable proportion of the working capital the farmer should have. Even so the farmer would have to work upon a much smaller proportion of borrowed capital than prevails in other busi ness, and in practice in Britain the farmer resorts to a dangerous extent to the tradespeople with whom he deals. The merchants who sell to him his requirements in manures and cakes and buy from him his corn and hay, and the auctioneers through whose hands pass the store cattle he buys and the finished cattle and sheep he has to sell, provide to a very large extent the financial backing of the industry. This custom obviously limits the power of the farmer to buy and sell in the best market, and it has been proposed by legalizing the creation of chattel mortgages to enable the banks to accord greater credit facilities. The farmer could then assign his livestock or his standing crops as security for advances.

The tenancy system undoubtedly assisted in the development of British farming in the i9th century, though it produced a cer tain number of cases of oppression when the power of the land owner to turn out a tenant for causes unconnected with farming remained unrestricted. The condition, however, of success in a tenancy system is the possession by the owner of a real knowledge of, and interest in, the conditions of farming. He (or, in the case of large estates or other interests, his agent) must have consider able technical knowledge, if he is to be a working element of the system, the adviser and leader of his tenants. The declining in terest of landowners in agriculture and the inadequate training of so many of the agents employed by them have been a main cause of the weakness that the tenancy system has latterly dis played and its hampering effect upon enterprise and innovation .among the farmers. Many people, therefore, aiming at a return to a system of occupying ownerships plead the necessity of free.. dom for the cultivator and the stimulus of the "magic of prop erty"; though it will be within the experience of those who have had occasion to survey the countryside in detail that even if some of the best, so also many of the worst, managed farms are the property of their occupiers. Further in a modern state no owner ship system persists; minors, females or men with other interests inherit, and the new owners pYefer to let rather than to sell. For these reasons it has been argued that the welfare of the industry demands the state ownership of all agricultural land and a stricter exercise of the continuing owner's interest in good farming.

Small Holdings.

Other observers who were impressed by the straits of wage-paying farming, even at the low rates for agri cultural labour, have sought a solution in a break up of the larger holdings characteristic of British farming and a return to the peasant system of family farms which are customary in most parts of the world. Even in the worst of the depression flourish ing colonies of small holders could be found in many parts of the country, and the creation of small holdings has been attended by an increase in the production from the soil. For instance in the Vale of Evesham grass farms on clay land which were indiffer ently grazed, and yielded but a poor return of milk and store stock, became intensively cultivated for asparagus, plums and other vegetables and fruit ; where there had been perhaps one man employed per hundred acres, the small holders would make a thrifty living on fifteen acres of the new cultivation. Considera tion of such cases led to the Small Holdings Act of i9o8 (see ante, British Farming Systems) and to a widespread demand for a gen eral policy of dividing up the land. It is doubtful, however, whether the admitted success of small holdings is a sufficient basis to justify their general application to British conditions. The success of small holdings depends upon two factors. The small holder, being his own master, works harder and more intelligently and for longer hours than the paid labourer ; he also throws in the work of his family, often of considerable amount. Large farmers would agree that if they could get from their labourers the quality of work put in by the small holder they could pay wages even higher than the returns obtained by the small holder. Small hold ers, therefore, are concerned with the production of those things in which manual labour bulks largely, but also they must engage in a branch of the industry that has a rising market, and prefer ably one that is naturally protected. With their ears to the ground they have been quick to seize upon small things that the large farmer neglects. Milk, potatoes, vegetables, fruit and poultry, and occasionally pigs, have been the produce upon which the small holders have depended. They rarely touch the main lines of farming—corn, beef, or sheep and even with milk they often make their profit by combining retailing with production. Thus the opportunities for small holding are limited and the markets they cater for are easily overstocked although as regards milk and vege tables they have reaped the. advantage of a demand that has been steadily rising for years. As a rule small holders require good land and can make little use of the great areas of the chalk and clay soils.

While it is generally agreed that small holdings are unsuited to the production of corn or cattle and sheep breeding it is argued that even these branches of agriculture could be pursued if they were organized for the co-operative use of machinery, pedigree sires, etc. But this is only equivalent to saying that small hold ing farming could be successful if imperfectly and by agreement it adopted the methods of large farming. Co-operative farming has not been realized and the mark of the small holder is his in dependence; as a rule he has only become united with co-operative selling societies when he has been under the necessity of work ing for an export market. Nor is there necessarily any greater production from land under small holdings; in the instance quoted above the increases are due to a change in system introduced by the small holder. But the large-scale fruit grower or market gardener or milk farmer will produce more per acre and that of better quality than the small holder working single-handed. Or ganization and the command of capital in the large businesses tell even against the individual attention which is the asset of the small holder ; spraying is more suitably undertaken on an exten sive scale, clean milk more often comes from the large herds. The greater production per acre of the small holder is often a consequence of the more intensive farming which he is forced to adopt but which would be uneconomic if the labour had to be paid for. There are thus two cardinal difficulties attending upon a revival of a peasant system of farming in Britain, one economic, the other social. The economic drawback is the higher capital outlay involved ; the creation of a colony of small holdings necessi tating expenditure on buildings, roads, fencing, water supply, etc., that is much greater than would be required on a farm of equal area and engaged in the same type of farming. But it is not germane to quote the excessive cost of the small holdings set up after the war, which reached £ 2,000 and upwards per holding, because at that time no farm, large or small, could have been equipped on bare land so as to produce an economic rent. The old peasant holdings inherit in their buildings and equipment, the results of the gradual unpaid labour of many generations, and when the holding is sold this accumulated capital is counted cheap, because the price is based upon the farm's earning capacity, not upon what it would cost to reproduce it : hence the prime eco nomic difficulty of building up small holdings de novo. The sec ond question is whether small holdings can persist on any large scale under modern conditions. Depending on the basis of the occupier giving his labour cheaply as measured in terms of hours and wage rates, the total cash returns from a small holding are often little or no better than the wages of the agricultural labourer and still less than those of the industrial worker. A certain num ber of men are always prepared to give this price for their in dependence and for the chance of getting on, and upon this fact depends the social value, even the necessity, of small holdings. But it cannot be expected that a whole class of the community will permanently consent to lower wages and longer hours. Looking back at the history of British farming the merger of the smaller into the larger farms has always been going on. In other countries peasant farming has persisted longer because of the slower de velopment of the industries, though even in France to-day the peasant is being attracted from the land, and in America the younger generation looks askance at continuing the family farm. It is in China, Japan and India that the sheer pressure of popula tion maintains the one man farmer at a standard of living barely above the starvation level. Some small holdings are a necessity as a social safety valve; but a general return to small holdings would not solve the problem of increased food production. Farming is an industry like any other and a return to small holdings would be as much a retrograde step as would be a return to hand weav ing. Nor is the argument valid that the State would gain by hav ing more men employed upon the land. If extra men are em ployed on the land because the production has been intensified there is a gain, but if the extra labour has only to make up for an inefficient method there is loss. To prohibit machinery and return to spade labour would ensure the greatest number of men upon the land but the community would lose thereby. That com munity is the richer which employs the smaller proportion of persons in the production of its necessary food, leaving thereby a greater number free for the production of clothes, houses, etc., and other elements constituting wealth.

Industrialized Farming.

It is obvious that on the large farm very considerable economies of working can be effected, especially from the use of machinery. The cheapening of costs of production depends upon making manual labour more effective. Modern power cultivators are likely to be large in order to secure that speed and depth of working proper to their work; they there fore require large fields to save turning about and only broad acres defray their heavy overhead cost. Farming is no exception to other industries in that large scale working by its powers of organization and concentration of effort can obtain better work done at a lower cost. The improvement of live stock by breeding and selection is only possible with numbers upon which to work. Buying and selling is better done on a large scale, however much the small holder may be able to obviate his weakness by co-opera tion. Large scale enterprise can employ those methods of costing and recording upon which good management is based. In his technical methods the small holder must work by tradition; he cannot afford to experiment and is therefore slower to accept new ideas. Furthermore the land still requires considerable capital expenditure if it is to be put to its best use ; and drainage, the straightening of boundaries, and similar wholesale improvements are not practicable except on a large tract of land. It seems in evitable that as intensified production becomes imperative to pro vide food for a growing population it can only be obtained by large scale industrialized working. Two conditions, however, must be fulfilled before large scale farming can be attempted with con fidence. First of all a new art of management must be evolved, based upon systematic cost accounting and a critical knowledge of average standard costs. Good farming has hitherto been very much a personal affair depending upon the experience, intuition and determination of the individual. Industrialized farming will always require the qualities of the old farmer—his eye and en ergy ; but it also calls for more calculated management even though farming cannot be standardized like other industries. The other condition of success is the formation of a corps of workers trained for their job and rewarded accordingly. The old type of agricultural labourer was a highly skilled man; much of the work of farming is now being done by men who have been prevented by some defect from entering other walks of life, or by youths who have been left to learn their craft haphazard. Efficiency de mands efficient men, for however much machinery may be em ployed a farm cannot be supervised like a factory. But if the fu ture of agricultural production lies with industrial farming, a bigger unit will be required than the present average British hold ing. Successful as was the farm of 200-50oac. as a first step towards intensive production, it has become an uneconomic unit to-day; it is too small to take f ull advantage of machinery, is still retail in its buying and selling and demands too large a proportion of its turnover for management. With an average ratio of six la bourers to one farmer on English farms, the business is insuffi cient adequately to pay one man solely engaged in management, and even units of 5ooac. are not large enough. The proper unit is probably something of the order of 5,000ac., with some hierarchy of managers and under managers into which young men who have been trained for the work could enter in subordinate positions. But it is also one of the handicaps of the present system of British farming that its management is too rarely recruited from school or college as other businesses are. The possession of capital is more often the condition of entry and too often is regarded as dispensing with the need for any technical training; but the industry would be the gainer from a greater leaven of men who began on a more educated plane.

World Agriculture.

The depression under which agriculture is now labouring would seem, however, to offer little chance of a reorganization of the industry along industrial lines, there being nothing to tempt the large capitalists to take up food produc tion. This depression is felt in all countries and, as the Economic Conference at Geneva in 1927 indicated, it is the outcome of the deficient purchasing power of Europe and of China due to in dustrial depression. It was perhaps initiated by the deflation policy of the leading States, because it is evident that the low prices are not due to overproduction in the usual sense of the word.

If we exclude from consideration Asia and tropical Africa, as being both self-contained in the matter of food, the population of the rest of the world, constituting roughly the countries inhabited by the white races of mankind, increased between 1913 and 1926 by approximately 5o millions, or 71%. The corresponding increase in the area of cultivated land is sus ceptible of even less accurate estimation, but according to the best figures available is about 36 million hectares. Meantime, however, agriculture had not been intensified, rather the reverse, and on the basis of current. farming one hectare of land (2lac. ) is required to produce the food and other agricultural materials consumed by one unit of population. On this showing the in creased food production since 1913 has not kept pace with the growth of population. Considering again the countries making returns to the International Institute of Agriculture, the wheat acreage has increased in the same period from 109 to 119 million hectares, the production from 1,029 to 1,139 million quintals, i.e., nearly But part of this increase in wheat has been purchased at the cost of other crops. In the countries other than Asia and Africa the four chief cereals for human consumption, wheat, rye, barley and maize, taken together, have only increased in area by 4% and in production by 5%. Food animals have increased, cat tle by 12%, sheep by 2%, while pigs have declined by 4%, from which an increase of 8% in the meat production may be esti mated. These figures lead to the conclusion that latterly the ex pansion of world food production has not been keeping pace with the growth of world population, even taking account of the rela tive checks imposed by the war and by its consequences. The low prices result from the deficient purchasing power of the larger population and from the fact that the greater part of the food production of the world is car ried on by peasant farmers. This method of farming can neither alter its production in response to a lower demand nor combine to maintain prices. The men who are engaged in it accept the bad times because in the main no alternative is open to them, and by their capacity to endure hard ships and yet persist in produc tion at the low prices prevailing, they ruin the capitalist farmers who have to pay wages. But there are signs that the indifferent returns of peasant farming as compared with wage earning in the industries is beginning to tell in the withdrawal of men from the land. It is clearly happening in the United States and in France, where may be seen in progress the movement that characterized England in the latter part of the i8th century. Peasant farming does not persist when industry and commerce come near and display their openings to the farmer. Moreover the opportunities for creating new peasant communities of farmers have become smaller; great stretches of unoccupied fertile land in temperate climates, such as were settled in the i9th century and provided food for the then unprecedented growth of population, have diminished. The demand for food and other raw materials produced from the land must soon be felt by the still growing population, and any return of industrial prosperity is likely to be followed by a sudden upward rush of prices because there is no margin of overproduction and accumulated stocks behind the present low prices. Production adequate to meet the real needs of the existing population cannot be met by extending the cultivated area but will require an intensification of farming on the land now available. Intensification will only be prompted by better prices and will then best be realized by large scale f arm ing on industrial lines.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-W. Somerville, Agriculture, a general discussion of Bibliography.-W. Somerville, Agriculture, a general discussion of the principles of farming (1912) ; A. D. Hall, A Pilgrimage of British Farming, a description of the chief farming areas just before the War (1913) ; A. W. Ashby, Allotments and Small Holdings in Oxfordshire, descriptive, but contains a valuable discussion of the economics of small holdings (1917) ; T. H. Middleton, Food Production in War, a detailed account of the work of the Food Production Department (1923) ; E. M. East, Mankind at the Cross Roads (1923) ; R. W. Prothero, English Farming, Past and Present, the standard history of British Farming (4th ed., 1927) . See Final Report of the Agricultural Tribunal of Investigation, containing a discussion of French and German as well as of British agricultural systems (Cmd. 2,145, H.M. Stationery Office, 1924) ; The Agricultural Output of England and Wales, 1925, setting out the recent changes in production, labour, etc. (Cmd. 2,815, H.M. Stationery Office, 1927) ; Report of the World Economic Conference (League of Nations, 1927), where the accom panying documentation is of great value as a review of the economic position of agriculture; International Year Book of Agricultural Statistics, the indispensable annual digest of the agricultural statistics of all countries (International Institute of Agriculture, Rome) .

(A. D. H.)