AGRICULTURE
Farms or follies
DENNIS WARREN
Dennis Warren is the manager of a 2,500 acre estate in Oxfordshire.
'God gave up making land a long time ago, but he is still making people'. Such was the answer I received from my father when, as a boy, I asked why the price of land was always rising. I am much less puzzled by that reply now and indeed use it in an entirely different context; for to the farmer it is a far greater guarantee that his products will always be needed than any politician will ever give him. The population of this coun- try wilt double in twenty years; the human female breeding herd that will achieve this is here and walking about.
In this week of the farm price review it is worth remembering that this nation has been unable to feed itself for a great many years, and that it never will be able to do so again, so the farmer must accept that he has to live with the competition of imported foods; the public, however, must not expect him to lower his standard of living to those of his foreign rivals. But subsidies, and import or export levies, are political issues; they do not in any way affect the suitability of any particular soil or rainfall to produce a particular crop or to maintain an animal enterprise. Yet their very existence has made farm products viable in areas where they were simply not produced at all before the war. If the subsidy is wholly or partially removed from any particular branch of the industry (as has happened in the case of cereals), then the farmer is out on a limb.
That a rise in farming income is needed, if only to keep up with rising costs, is doubted by few. But one wonders if the very basis of the support system and the massive (very efficient) advisory service available to farmers do not in themselves create an unseen problem. The farmer has forgotten to cash in on his assets; to do this he must pro- duce what suits his area and, even more vital, what suits his farm. So many are practising husbandry that is entirely foreign to their en- vironment and their own skills. It is this foolhardy rush to be in fashion that has brought so many tractors out to block pro- vincial streets and set so many farmers heading down Whitehall to Westminster. This 'fashionable' farming has also been en- couraged by improved communications; the farmer's horizon has widened vastly since the war, and so we have ridiculous and sometimes tragic examples of farmers trying to copy husbandry that is only a success hundreds of miles away where conditions are different. The greatest 'snowball' came when a few farmers of good high-humus soils threw away the 'good husbandry' rule book and grew cereal crops continuously on the same land. To people who had been tied for seven days a week to the chore of attending animals, this seemed heaven-sent. They in- vested in huge harvesting and cultivating machinery and scalped their land by pulling up the fences and pushing down hedges in order to give themselves room to manoeuvre. They were proud to be known as 'Barley Barons' and some boasted of a cropping rotation of four years' barley and one year world cruise. There are many sadly disillusioned barley barons today with insufficient capital to restock their worked- out acres.
Galloway cattle and hill sheep, bred for centuries to survive under the extreme con- ditions of the Scottish Highlands or the mountains of Wales, where almost any other domestic animal would die, are to be seen on the rich grazing pastures of Devon, where their liveweight gains are far less than the native breed. That some farmers have learnt their lesson is proved by the retreat of the Ayrshire cow back to Scotland where she is supreme. But as any farmer who has pioneered a farming development will verify, the cement is hardly dry or the first wheel turning before his biggest problem becomes a deluge of visiting formers escorted by ministry officials, all anxious to see if there is anything in it for them.
If we accept that farmers on fertile land, with a suitable climate, capable of averaging a minimum of thirty-five cwt of cereals per acre over the years, and including in their cropping rotation some of the highly pro- fitable root or vegetable crops, are not doing too badly even today, then the main problem lies with producers who have to include grass in their cropping rotation to maintain fertility. Converting grass to cash through sheep and cattle demands considerable capital. The smaller the farmer, the larger the problem. One grain of comfort, perhaps, is that grass is the only worthwhile source of vegetable protein now available to farmers in Great Britain. The demands of an ever grow- ing world population for vegetable proteins, such as soya bean, have ended the days of cheap imported proteins; any animal en- terprise based on a farmer's normal capital resources must involve maximum production from this country's most neglected crop—grass.
One would have thought it was obvious that grants and subsidies to agriculture, although we are told they are part of a government policy for cheap food, are really means of controlling production. And it seems to me that as soon as a product reaches the point where it challenges the im- ports of a nation that just might import a few more motorcars, then support is removed until the tide flows the other way. Un- fortunately, farmers cannot change gear as quickly as politicians; the most minor change must take two years to put into prac- tice. Add to this the effects of the meddling of some of the marketing boards, and it is clear that any farmer who strays too far away from conditions imposed by his home ground must be very wary.
Farmers, like any businessmen mustlook ahead. But it would do none of them any harm to take a hard, backwards look also, at the way their grandfathers went on. What is needed, in brief, is a return to sensible husbandry suited to the land they farm—and to hell with policies manipulated by Whitehall or glamourised by Lime Grove.
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