THE LAND AND LABOUR
By H. D. WALSTON
AGRICULTURE in its most primitive form is an essentially seasonal occupation. In East Africa, for instance, the native farmer works hard for a week or so during the rainy season in order to plant his crop, and then has several months of almost complete idleness until it is ready to be harvested. In Southern Italy, which is transitional between the advanced agriculture .of Western Europe and the primitive agriculture of Africa, a farmworker is employed on an average of 120 to rso days a year and the rest of the time is idle. Not for a century has such a state of affairs existed in England, the vast majority of farmworkers being able to count on steady employment throughout the year.
In spite of this, however, we have always had the problem of seasonal labour ; until recently extra labour was needed during the hay and corn harvest. This was met in two ways—partly by over- time, the men working from sunrise to dark, and partly by recruiting the wives and children of the regular farm staff to give a hand with the lighter jobs. Several things have happened in the last ten years which have significantly altered the picture. In the first place, the harvesting of corn and hay has become more mechanised, so that it no longer imposes the strain on labour that it used to. Secondly, there has been a big increase in the acreage of potatoes and sugar-beet, so that on many farms the peak now occurs during the root harvest and at the time of potato-planting and sugar-beet hoeing. Thirdly, legislation has made it increasingly difficult to employ children for farmwork, while higher agricultural wages and increased opportunities for women to find casual employ- ment in industry have made the prospect of earning a few pounds extra by helping in the harvest-field less attractive than it used to be.
As a war-time expedient to overcome these difficulties and to encourage the farmer to produce more, the Ministry of Agriculture, through its War Agricultural Committees, started schemes for mobile labour in every county. These mobile gangs consisted partly of voluntary harvest-workers and partly of land-girls, conscientious objectors and prisoners of war, who were employed on reclamation work when they were not needed on farms. Since the war the possibilities of obtaining mobile labour of this type have greatly diminished, and there is no more reclamation work to provide useful employment during slack times, but the seasonal demand remains. What is especially serious is that many farmers have now got into the habit of thinking that if the Government wants them to grow certain crops, it has a duty to supply them with semi-skilled labour at a moment's notice to carry out the work. Furthermore, while the farmer is willing to pay a reasonable rate for men so long as they are working for him, he would feel greatly aggrieved if he were asked to contribute something towards the cost of maintaining them when they were not on his farm. What it comes to is this: agri- culture still requires a certain amount of seasonal labour to help it over its peak periods ; the pre-war sources of this labour no longer exist in sufficient quantities ; the methods adopted as war-time ex- pedients cannot be expected to last indefinitely ; so thought must be given to the best means for solving the problem.
One means of doing it is by encouraging in country districts the setting-up of light industries, preferably those ancillary to agriculture,
which would give employment during most of the year to a large rural population, but would leave people free for agriculture during the peak seasons. There are serious drawbacks to such an apparently attractive idea. Some semi-agricultural industries, such as fruit-preserving and vegetable-canning or freezing, are seasonal. but the peaks coincide with the agricultural peaks. Others, better described as handicrafts, can give profitable employment to people who live in the country ; but it is rare to find somebody who has been engaged for nine or ten months in the year in basket-making or wood-work who is prepared to go out in October and November to lift sugar-beet. There is also a difficulty here following upon mechanisation. A friend of mine, who is a market-gardener not far from Coventry, was puzzled as to what to do during the off-season with the large number of women who were needed during some of the year to pick peas and plant cabbages. He eventually hit on the idea of making parts for a light engineering firm, but soon found the business so profitable and the demand so great that he installed machinery to increase his output. Once having invested capital in the machinery, he was unwilling to let it remain idle while the women went out to pick peas, with the result that he found he had provided full-time employment for his former part-time market- garden workers, and then had to look round for more casual labour.
The second and most popular answer to the question is mechanisa- tion, and this undoubtedly has done a great deal to reduce the demand at peak periods. Unfortunately, whenever one peak period disappears another one automatically arises ; for instance, as has already been said, the 'adoption of the self-binder and later the combine-harvester has very largely done away with the corn-harvest peak, but in its place we have the root-harvest peak. A machine for mechanising the beet or potato harvest will only accentuate the difficulties of root- hoeing, and when that problem is overcome, another hitherto un- suspected peak will undoubtedly arise. Apart from this argument, there is little likelihood that satisfactory machines will be available within the next few years to solve once and for all the difficulties not only of growing roots, but of all seasonal demands for labour. We must look elsewhere for a permanent solution.
To my mind we have in the past erred by trying to solve our difficulties by reducing our labour requirements at peak periods instead of by increasing our production at slack periods. In other words, every farm should aim at a programme of production which offers a steady demand for labour throughout the year. This does not necessarily mean that we should aim at mixed farming and give up attempts at specialisation. There is no reason why a specialised farm should not even out its labour requirements just as much as a mixed farm—more so, in fact, because it can make more efficient use of such labour-saving machinery as is available.
Take, for instance, the zoo- to r50-acre farm specialising in milk- production, but growing, as it must at present, grain, hay and silage to feed its own cows, kale for winter fodder, and wheat and potatoes to conform to the national plan. Such a farm would probably employ four or five hands in all, and these will be sufficient except when the potatoes have to be planted and harvested. At present the farmer relies on the help of two or three casual workers from the county pool. If, instead of these casual workers, he had one extra permanent man, he could grow all the potatoes that he has done in the past, and, although it might take him a bit longer to plant and harvest them, the net result would be no worse, as he would be able to start at the best possible time instead of waiting until casual labour was free to come.
His problem would then be to find profitable employment for the extra man throughout the rest of the year. This he could do, for instance, by dividing up his grazing paddocks—which he cannot do now because he has not any spare labour to see to the fresh fencing— and in this way adopt controlled grazing and greatly increase his output of grass. He can thus keep more cattle during the summer and make more silage for winter feed ; in other words, he can keep perhaps twenty-five cows in place of twenty. If even with this increased output he still finds during the winter that he has surplus labour, he can rear a few more calves, repair some of his implements himself instead of paying somebody to do it, and, if he is an owner- occupier, improve his buildings and perhaps -extend his water-supply. I doubt if there is a single farm in England which could not profitably use an extra man throughout the year. This solution must not be taken as an argument for a greater total labour force in agriculture. It merely means that those who work on the land should be employed upon it full-time, and that they should be given the chance of know- ing and taking an interest in one job and one farm in place of moving continually from one employer to another.
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