AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS. 31 



becoming evident that the policy of the Government 

 whether wisely or unwisely, a question which may be 

 debatable must lead to the fixing of prices for all the 

 main articles of food. Lord Rhondda, therefore, quite 

 rightly regarded this as his trump suit and laid his plans 

 accordingly. An elaborate administrative machinery for 

 costing was established, the theory being that for every 

 article a fair price should be fixed, after detailed enquiry by 

 skilled persons, based on cost of production plus a reason- 

 able profit. A large amount of information of value to 

 the Food Ministry was obtained, but it is not unfair to say 

 that in practice it did not work out as well as in theory it 

 should have done. At any rate this was so in the case of 

 home-produced foods. The more detailed the enquiries 

 the more they disclosed the extraordinary range of the 

 figures purporting to represent cost of production, and in 

 the end the actual prices fixed were necessarily arrived at 

 on very broad grounds and on the basis of wide generalisa- 

 tions. 



The comparative failure of these attempts at a scientific 

 system directed prominent attention to the fact that farmers 

 generally made no real attempt to ascertain the cost of 

 producing a particular crop or a particular commodity such 

 as meat or milk. They knew pretty accurately whether 

 their business as a whole was paying or not (though char- 

 acteristically they kept the knowledge to themselves) at 

 any given time, but it was usually conducted on the prin- 

 ciple that " what they lost on the swings they made up on 

 the roundabouts." 



Thus with full official approval, and indeed on official 

 initiative, an Agricultural Costings Committee was set up 

 with the main object of stimulating and assisting farmers 

 to keep proper accounts on a cost basis, i.e., in such a manner 

 that the costs of production are duly apportioned to the 

 various items which are produced and sold. 



Incidentally this Committee has some historic interest 

 as one of the last attempts to establish a department for 

 the whole of the United Kingdom. It comprised representa- 

 tives official and unofficial of England and Wales, Scot- 



