M.—AGRICULTURE 231 
such as cattle feeding, or the manufacture of starch, etc., there are many 
competing commodities, such as maize, which are less costly to produce. 
The case of the northern farmer has a good deal in common with that 
of the Lancashire cotton spinner—both are suffering from the general 
depression, but also from a special decline in demand for their particular 
products. The permanent solution must be gradually to replace the 
oat crop by some other; and State assistance to this end would be of 
greater ultimate benefit to the industry than a subsidy or other device to 
make oat growing again profitable. 
Let me conclude by trying to draw a picture of the changes in farming 
and in rural life that would be both desirable and possible in a world 
where the principle of a fair price was permanently established, and where 
agriculturists would fairly share the benefits from any future improvement 
in their efficiency as producers. I cannot, as I have already said, foresee 
any large increase in the numbers of people employed on British farms, 
or any large schemes of land reclamation which would add materially 
to our agricultural area. ‘These things can be achieved only at a real 
and considerable cost to the consumer, for they would imply a displace- 
ment of cheap production overseas by relatively dear production at home. 
What one can foresee is the rapid spread of a variety of measures of 
reorganisation calculated to increase the output per unit of labour. 
Seventy years ago the rent of the land was usually, and by far, the largest 
single item of the farmer’s expenditure ; ordinary farm land might pay 
a rent of three pounds an acre, while wages were ten shillings a week ; 
the landlord’s share of the net output might easily be twice that of labour. 
Hence the chief objective in farming was economy of land—high output 
_ per acre. Now that land is abundant and rent a comparatively small 
_ fraction of expenditure, the chief object must be economy of labour. 
There is indeed already a growing tendency to fit the land and the 
capital to the man rather than the man and capital to the land. This is 
implied in the use of the word unit, which is becoming so common, for 
example, in relation to pig, dairy and poultry enterprises. The unit is 
a department designed with the primary end of providing the optimum 
amount of work for a whole-time skilled specialist, with or without a 
limited amount of less skilled or partially trained labour. The man 
is equipped with a labour-saving device whenever this will make possible 
an economic increase in his output, and his functions become, to an 
ever-increasing extent, mental in character. 
This kind of change must obviously tend towards an increase in the 
size of individual departments on the farm—one thinks, for example, of 
one-man units of 300 pigs or 2,000 head of poultry, or of two-men dairy 
units of sixty or seventy cows—and hence it must often imply either an 
increase in the size of the farm or, alternatively, some degree of simplifi- 
cation and specialisation of its organisation. ‘This simplification, together 
with a growing tendency to delegate management to heads of departments, 
may be expected to reduce management as well as labour costs. Moreover 
a great part of the function of management in the past has been marketing, 
and the development of the marketing schemes may be expected greatly 
to reduce this side of the work. A ‘ clean-boot’ farmer on three or 
