PLANNING THE LAND OF BRITAIN 495 



as a whole, is in a very depressed condition, and one can only say that the 

 agricultural land of Britain represents a distressed area. 



The history of the past ten years of agriculture is instructive. In that 

 period the total area of cultivated land in England and Wales has lost 

 something like 1,000,000 acres or 3 per cent, of its total area. The 

 arable land, which is the heart and most important part of the thing, 

 has shrunk from 10,300,000 to 9,000,000, a loss of over 1,000,000 acres 

 being 12 per cent, off what it was ten years ago. If we take a particular 

 form of the industry such as small fruit — raspberries and black currants — 

 we find that 69,000 in 1937 have been reduced to 52,800 acres to-day, 

 representing a loss of 24 per cent. Vegetables have increased from 

 128,000 acres to 150,000 acres, but what is very symptomatic of the 

 depression which has fallen on the industry is that those rough grazings 

 (referred to by Dr. Stamp), which represent the margin of land the farmer 

 thinks no longer worth while including in his cultivated land (though he 

 may let his stock run over them at times), just about 4,000,000 acres in 

 1927, are 5,500,000 acres this year. There has been an increase in the 

 wastage of cultivated land as well as in the actual loss of the cultivated areas. 



The most significant thing in this period has been the loss of working 

 men on the land. In 1927 the regular wage-earning workers numbered 

 587,000. This year they number 489,000, representing a loss of 17 per 

 cent, in ten years. That loss has fallen most heavily on the youngest 

 section, workers under twenty-one years of age, for, while there were 134,000 

 of them in 1927, there are only 94,500 to-day — a loss of nearly 30 per cent., 

 which illustrates significantly the progressive decline in agriculture. 



Anyone familiar with farming knows that a great deal of the land is 

 not being properly utilised. By what means and by what processes can it 

 be taken in hand ? Some look on agriculture as a means of finding a large 

 amount of employment by settling a large number of men on the land, 

 men who become a stable type of citizen, regarded by some Governments 

 as productive of the best kind of soldier. In Germany the land, in places, 

 is being parcelled out, the number of small holdings is being enormously 

 increased, and steps are being taken to tie these men as far as possible to the 

 land, to create ' a peasant aristocracy,' who, by various means, by giving them 

 a certain pre-eminence, will be induced to stay on the land and not be 

 tempted away by economic considerations. There are attempts to forbid, 

 on that class of holding, the introduction of machinery, so that the maximum 

 amount of labour shall be employed. 



But to adopt such a national plan is to forgo the full economic use of the 

 land out of which the most food required for the needs of the country 

 should be obtained. There cannot be any doubt at all that material 

 progress in agriculture has generally replaced manual labour by some- 

 thing in the shape of a machine. It may be that the introduction of 

 machinery is the only means of keeping that land in cultivation at all ; 

 otherwise, by pressure of circumstances it would drift off into the poorest 

 type of grazing, with practically no employment upon it at all. It must 

 be borne in mind that the use of machinery and applied science, while it 

 diminishes the amount of manual labour for a given operation, may intensify 

 the use of the land as a whole, and there are farms where mechanisation 

 has so developed the land that it is carrying twice as many men as in the 

 days when there was nothing but horse labour and hand harvesting. 



Suppose we decide on a plan for agriculture, there is no doubt that it 

 would have to begin by deciding not only what its aim is going to be, 

 production or increased employment, but also what types of production 

 are most required in the national interest. It would have to determine 



