AGRICULTURE - THE POST-WAR DEPRESSION The course of agriculture after the war will be best appreciated by a study of prices. The following table shows the average prices of some of the chief items of agricultural produce for the cereal years (Sept.–Aug.) 1913-14 to 1926-27.
ancies in case of persistent bad cultivation or neglect, and even to enter upon the land and act themselves in cases of default. Wages boards were continued and tenants were given greater security of tenure by provisions which compelled the landlord to give compensation for disturbance equivalent to a year's or even up to four years' rent, unless the county agricultural committee would certify that the notice to quit was justified by the bad cul tivation of the tenant. The Agriculture Act had, however, but a brief existence. It antedated by only a few months the break in prices of 1921, and it soon became evident that under the guar antees the State would be called upon to pay a very large sum War prices were maintained until the spring of 1921, then they dropped by about one-third by the close of the year. The prime cause was the deflation of money in Great Britain and America which was then effected ; the secondary causes were the abundant harvests in the vastly expanded area of cereals in the Americas, particularly in Canada, and the lack of purchasing power among the war-ruined population of Europe. Prices in Britain continued to fall until 1923, then tended to recover a little until the long continued coal strike of 1926 produced a new fall which specially hit the class of farmers who had so far suffered least, namely, the producers of milk and meat. The situation has been aggravated by a succession of bad seasons since 1918, which of themselves would have hurt the position of farmers even in normal times. Bad growing seasons, wet harvests, foot and mouth disease, have been serious contributory factors in the ruinous condition in which British farming now finds itself. Deflation alone wrote off nearly half the capital farmers estimated they possessed in 1921, and though this did not really alter the position of men who had been farming continuously from before the war, it fell heavily upon those who had entered farming during the years of high prices or had mortgages out from the purchase of their farms.
The state of agriculture has not been without consideration and legislative action during the post-war period. War experiences had persuaded both Parliament and the general public that the maintenance of a prosperous agriculture was of some moment in the national policy. Even during the war a reconstruction committee under Lord Selborne had examined the question and drawn up a series of recommendations on which the Corn Production Act of 1917 had to some extent been based. But that Act, as already seen, had immediately become nugatory as far as guarantee of prices was concerned. As the outcome of a Royal Commission which sat in 1919 an Agriculture Act was passed in 1920, which accepted the main principles of the old Act by charging the State with the payment of subsidies on the acre age of wheat and oats grown, whenever the prices fell below the assessed costs of production. The county agricultural committees became statutory bodies endowed with powers to determine ten upon the acreage of wheat and oats grown. The basal figure had in fact been set much too high for oats, a crop which is mostly consumed upon the farm and which therefore does not greatly af fect the income of the farmer. But no attempt was made to remedy this defect ; the public cry for economy was so insistent that the Act itself was repealed in 1921 within io months of its passing, in spite of all the promises set out in the Act that four years' notice would be given before the guarantees were with drawn. The repeal coincided with the very situation the Act was designed to obviate, a wholesale break in prices brought about by causes beyond the control of the farmer, brought about indeed in this case by the deliberate deflation policy of the Gov ernment. With the guarantees the wages board disappeared and though conciliation committees were set up in most counties, the average weekly wage dropped from 42s. in September, 1921, to less than 28s. before the end of 1922. The repeal of the Agricul ture Act put an end to all ideas for a national constructive policy for agriculture, the industry must henceforward sink or swim by its own powers and be guided by its own lights. The action was part of the pessimism of the time, of the war weariness that shirks any sustained effort and doubts the value of any planning for the future. Bitterly as it was resented by the farmers, who thereby lost all confidence not only in governments but in agriculture it self, it was angrily acquiesced in, because they got rid of their two greatest bugbears—the shadow of control of farming and wages boards. The resentment generated by ploughing-up orders given in 1918 and other interferences consequent upon the orders of the food controller, had been worked up to an intensity out of all proportion to the actual hardship that had been inflicted, and farmers generally were prepared to purchase freedom at any cost. A very large proportion of them indeed grew little wheat or oats and were anxious to grow less in the difficult state of arable farm ing. So the farmers' representatives, while protesting, accepted the situation ; they saved those sections of the Act that gave them compensation from disturbance (provisions which have injured the land-owners and are in many respects a hindrance to the im provement of farming) and they obtained as a slight recognition of the sacrifice imposed upon them the allocation of a million pounds to the extension of agricultural research and education.
Since that period the National Farmers' Union, in which is con centrated the political opinion of the farming community, has been averse to any further interference of the State with agricul ture. The distressed state of the industry gave rise to a further enquiry in 1923—the Agricultural Tribunal, consisting of three economists not directly connected with agriculture, who produced an illuminating survey of the subject early in 1924. The main recommendation of this report, a subsidy upon arable land with further assistance to the growth of wheat, received little support from the farmers' organizations and was never adopted by the government of the day. It also recommended the re-establish ment of the wages boards and this was given effect to in
The only other legislative measures calling for some comment were an Act in 1922 which disposed of a long-standing controversy by permitting the admission of Canadian store cattle into Great Britain, and the Agricultural Credit Act of 1923 which gave some relief in the shape of cheap mortgages to farmers who had pur chased their holdings during the operation of the Corn Production and Agriculture Acts. Again the British Sugar (Subsidy) Act of 1925 provided a very ample scale of subsidies on sugar produced in Britain, for a period of 1 o years, in order to encourage the establishment of a sugar beet industry in this country.
The difficulties of agriculture at the end of 1927, enhanced by the bad harvest of the year, may be appre hended from a study of the course of prices, the cost of living and the weekly rate of wages from the beginning of the war down to the present time. The cost of living, being based on the general cost of commodities, is some index of the cost of the farmer's necessary purchases; the rate of wages measures the largest item in his expenditure, or from one-quarter to one-third of the total revival of industry takes place the land is likely to lose most o; its active and able-bodied men. Thus if no other change super venes, farming, except for those special businesses that can com mand a sheltered or a luxury market, will be reduced to a species of ranching with a minimum of labour. There is one alternative— a sustained effort to make labour more effective, on the one hand by better organization, by the use of machinery and the elimina tion of wasted effort, and on the other by careful training to in crease the skill of the individual. Much of what was called "good" farming before the war was still dealing with labour on a mid 19th century basis of wages, and though operations had been cheapened after the fall of prices of the eighties and the nineties, there has been no radical reconsideration of methods such as is called for by the modern relation of wages to the prices of agri cultural produce. This is the big problem before British agricul ture—the revision of all its traditions of husbandry, and it re quires the co-operation of the investigators, both scientific and economic, with the study by individual farmers of the conditions imposed by their own farm and particular business. The investi gators may supply stimulus and guidance, but the main effort will have to be exerted by the farmers themselves, for the problem is one of management and practice, demanding a consideration of the technique of farming and the arts of leadership and man agement that has not been forthcoming for the last two genera tions. Some encouragement, some renewal of confidence may come from increasing prices, for the withdrawal of men from the land because of the superior rewards in other occupations is not confined to Britain but is common to all countries. It is affecting the peasant as well as the wage-earning labourer, it is manifest in the United States as in France. Its effect upon output must be come manifest, and as the world's population still continues to grow, scarcities will be declared, and whether by compulsion or by choice, farmers will have to intensify their production from the land.
