The Small Farmer's Future
By JACK DONALDSON THE annual discussions to decide farm prices in the coming year are now taking place be- tween the farmers' representatives and the experts of the Ministry of Agriculture. This year the results seem hardly in doubt. in spite of brave resolutions from the NFU demanding 'full re- coupment,' it seems probable that Mr. Heathcoat Amory had already .agreed to substantial cuts before" he left the Ministry of Agriculture to be- come Chancellor. Since Mr. Thorneycroft re- signed over £50 million, and since the supple- mentary estimates for agriculture amounted to £54 million, it is unlikely that the Minister gave nothing away; the fact that agriculture was men- tioned by no one as a .cause for disagreement suggests that he may, even have acquiesced in the maximum cuts possible under the 1957 Act. (Under the long-term guarantees given in 1957 the Government undertakes not to lower the total of price guarantees and production grants—plus or minus cost increases or decreases—by more than 24 per cent. in any one year.) The atmosphere is hostile to agriculture, as it is bound to be to an industry receiving over £300 million this year in direct assistance from the Exchequer and which is so near to over-produc- tion in so many of its products. Equally, the farmer is in a hurt, puzzled and resentful mood. He has been asked first to increase his produc- tion, then to increase his efficiency, then to lower his costs—and he has, in fact, done all three. His production is over 60 per cent. above prewar, he has shouldered without recompense £135 million.of increased costs over the last ten years, his prOductiOn per man, per livestock unit and per acre have all shown striking rises. Yet his income since 1948 is 8 per cent. down, while the national income has risen by 24 per cent. The truth is, of course, that the industry is suffering from redundancy, and increases in efficiency tend to make this situation worse. Re- dundancy affects agriculture rather differently from the ordinary manufacturing industry in that it is the farmer rather than the worker that is hit. In industry the worker is laid off and produc- tion reduced or suspended until the markets can again accept the product, and the worker has a powerful trade union behind him to see that all this is done with the minimum of hardship to himself. In farming it is the small farm unit rather than the large that is the first to be hit, and the workers are mainly employed on the large units. So it is the small farmer himself, the family farmer, who suffers. His first reaction is not to produce less, but to produce more in an effort to keep up his dwindling income, and, although he does this by becoming more efficient, the effect is to make over-production worse in all the com- modities he is best equipped to produce. mean- while, the larger farmer may be able to keep going by changing his methods or his lines of production and by using his greater acreage and his greater capital to manoeuvre against the ad- verse trading conditions.
These generalisations may lead to misunder- standing unless the 'small farm business' is more precisely defined. It cannot certainly be defined by, reference to acreage alone. One can find good men on medium land, properly capitalised, mak- ing £700-£800 a year, year in and year out, on farms of under fifty acres. The Farmers' Weekly pilot farm of 80 acres is budgeting for an income of £1,000 a year. On the other hand, many men, short of skill and capital and on poor land, have lost money on farms of 200 or 300 acres. Generally, however, it is easier to make some- thing of a large acreage, and in particular it is far, easier here to make use of cheap grass instead of expensive concentrates.
In 1955 there were 125,000 farms between twenty and one hundred acres in England and Wales. Perhaps half of the men on these farms are doing well at present, prices and are just as well able to look after themselves as the men on the bigger acreages. But on the other half, not fdWer than 50,000 farms, the farmers are earning less' than an agriCultural worker's Wage. If the Present trend' of general squeezes and lower farm • Prices is to continue, it' is these farMs which will', suffer and the families on ,them will drift into.
serious distress. • '' • It has been calciilated that a 5 per cent:reduc- tion in the' prices of the review commodities Would mean a 25-30 per cent. reduction in the income of the shiall• man earning 'under £500 a Year. This means that two years of maximum reduction under the 1957 Act, i.e. 24. per cent. Per annum, would bring the lowest income group eflaimers down to a level of £4 or £5 a week. Undisclosed earnings in the shape of cottage, telephone, milk, eggs and 'firewood may increase these figures by £2 or •£3 a week, but even so the family will find itself below the poverty line.
It would be a very sanguine prophet who would state with any confidence that the next few years Will not bring such reductions in prices. The in- fluence of US and Canadian grain surpluses and of our own local over-production of eggs and milk, and the increased pressure 'on prices to be expected from the coming of the Free Trade Area, will combine to make substantial annual reductions in prices hard to resist in time of strin- gency. Such reductions could be healthy in the case of the well-equipped and properly capitalised farms, whether large or small. They might force the use of better'grassland and put a brake on the conversion of imported concentrates which We can ill afford into milk which we do not want. But if such a drastic slimming is to be enforced on agriculture, there is little doubt that the 50,000 or so small men who are not doing well now Will find themselves in desperate straits. Fifty thousand families in distress can- constitute a formidable social problem.
That this has become a social problem and should no longer be treated as an agricultural one is the result of tremendous scientific advances in other spheres, and is the point stressed by Sir Solly Zuckermann in an address to the Oxford conference in January of this year. There is not room here to go fully into the reasons why for the first time in history the production from many small units as small units can almost certainly be dispensed with, but the present world surpluses of food (in spite of widespread undernourish- tnent) combined with the fact that the coming of the atomic age disposes of the 'old strategic argument of potential production in times of war Make it sufficiently obvious that many of these Milan acreages could be more efficiently farmed after regrouping into larger blocks, with enor- mous benefits both to the industry and to the nation and with almost no special danger to future food supplies in times of emergency, while the more intractable (for reasons of geography, soil- type, etc.) acreages could be dispensed with alto- gether (used posSIbly for afforestation) to the in- creased efficiency of farming as a whole.
Probably, then, the most inefficient as well as the most cruel policy in relation to this problem is the one that seems at the moment most likely to be adopted, a policy which might be described as one of laisser-aller, of putting the screw on to agriculture as a whole without regard to the enormous damage which may occur to a whole class of worthy and, in the final issue, unprotected people. If; however,.as has been suggested, the farmer on the: uneconomic unit were to be looked at as a social problem; .the first thing. that would .have to ,be decided is whether there are any reasons for keeping him in being,. ot whether any policy in regard to him should be directed solely to helping him to vacate these acreages, with:a view to regrouping them for agriculture or turning. them over to the Forestry Commission. Either way he should be removed from. the sphere of agricultural policy, so that-the.deadweight of his predicament should no longer defy all • attempts, to rationalise the structure of production and prices.
To sum up : present trends make a rise in agri- cultural prices most unlikely and a fall very possible: It must be the object of efficient govern- ment to anticipate the distress which such a fall must inflict on the weakest members of the agri- cultural community. Two kinds of action are possible : do the.one hand, to:attempt to bring more of the, small men into the 9ver-£500-a- year group—but with falling prices this would be very difficult; or, on the other hand, to help, the old, ill and generally discouraged to get out of their holdings, while making sure that these are not immediately reoccupied. The problems or administration are not insoluble, but are subject to two difficulties. One, the difficulty of defining the uneconomic. unit, since there seems to be no,exact guide such as acreage or even soil-type. It may be that farmers would have to be self- selective—that is, would have to come forward and appeal for special help while renouncing agri- cultural subsidies, etc. Two, no scheme has as yet been propounded which does not involve what is nowadays referred to as an 'army of officials' to administer it. This weakness, which need not be of the proportions constantly assumed, should not be allowed permanently to negate all attempts to approach a problem which becomes increas- ingly urgent.
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