(i) The cost of building and equipment;
(ii) The practice under which the cultivator provides all the movable
capital;
(iii) The handicap on free use of land imposed upon its owners by the
compensation clauses of the Agriculture Act.
These obstacles do real harm, in the first place, because a very large
proportion of farms in this country are the wrong size: too large for a
man to work with his hands, and too much for him to work with his head,
as Sir Thomas Middleton has well said. Figures show quite conclusively
that whether you take production per acre or production per man, the
farm of from 100 to 150 acres is economically the worst-sized unit.
Probably more than half of our farms lie between 70 and 100 acres. We
should get far more out of the land if all were either below 80--so that
a man and his family could manage them--or above 180, so that there
would be a chance of applying to production the most scientific methods
and up-to-date machinery.
But movement, either towards breaking up existing holdings or throwing
them together, will be extremely slow. The one process means building
new houses and buildings, which is prohibitive in price; and the other,
also fresh building and the abandonment of hearths and homes, which is
prohibited both by price and by sentiment. Any change in either
direction is almost prohibitive to the new poor landowner class, because
if one makes any change, except when a tenant dies or moves of his own
accord, one forfeits a year's rent.
I have not yet mentioned the difficulty about capital. Under our British
method, if a man wants a farm he must have capital--about £10 per arable
acre and about £5 for grass. This is a great bar to freedom of
experiment and the greatest bar on the way up the agricultural ladder.
There ought to be free access to our farms by town brains, which can
often strike out new and profitable lines if given a chance. It is not
good for agriculture, and it does not promote that sympathy and contact
and interchange which should exist between town and country, that a
start in farming should need a heavy supply of capital. If our
landlords were better off they might well try some of the continental
systems, under which the landlord provides not only the farm and
buildings, but the stock and equipment, and receives in addition to a
fair rent for the land half the profits of the farm. But it is vain to
hope for this under present conditions, and, for good or ill, the newly
rich does not buy land. He knows too much, and he can get what he wants
without it. He may lease a house, he does take shooting, but he won't
buy an estate.
When thinking of the importance of freedom of experiment and of a ladder
with no missing rungs, I have my mind on the possibility of the owner of
one estate of from 5,000 to 10,000 acres throwing all the farms and many
of the fields together and making his best tenants fellow-directors with
him of a joint enterprise, one doing the buying and selling, one looking
after the power and the tractors and implements, one planning the
agricultural processes, one directing the labour and so on. This gives a
prospect of the greatest production and the greatest profit, and it
gives a really good labourer a chance which at present he has not got.
At present, unless he leaves the land, in nine cases out of ten once a
labourer always a labourer. My vision would give him a chance to become,
first, foreman, then assistant manager, manager, director, and
managing-director. It ought to be tried--but how one's tenants would
loathe it, and quite natural too! At present if things go wrong, if it's
not the fault of the Government or the weather, it's the farmer's own
fault. On my joint-stock estate every director and manager would feel
that all his colleagues were letting him down and destroying his
profits. It is hard to make people accept at all readily, in practice,
the teaching that they are their brothers' keeper.
The scheme could hardly be started with men accustomed to the present
methods, and the cost of obtaining vacant possession of land would make
it difficult to try with new men. I am sure, however, that something of
the sort is a good and hopeful idea, and the best way of making the
ladder complete. And I am emboldened to think that something of the sort
will be tried gradually in some places, when I see the number of
landlords' sons who are in this and other universities taking the best
courses they can get in the science and economics of agriculture. They
know this is the only way to retain a remnant of the old acres. It is
quite new since the war--and a most hopeful sign.