July 27, 1916 
LAND & WATER • 
English Farming 
As Viewed by an American Farmer 
15 
E^ 
jNGLAND. at a pinch, could be made lo 
feed herself v/ithin hve years, but I sincerely 
^hope that the necessity will never arise." 
Thus spoke an English civil engineer— with 
considerable experience in reclamation and irrigation 
work in India and Australia — who visited me at my 
California ranch six years ago. Not unnaturally,' I asked 
him why it was not the most devoutly-to-be-wished-for 
consummation that his country should become inde- 
pendent in the matter of its food supply. 
" England's backwardness in agricultural production is 
her ' heel of Achilles' I said; "what could be more 
desirable than that tlie menace from this quarter should, 
if it were really possible, be removed through internal 
development ? " 
" Because, in the first place," was the reply, " our 
' heel of Achilles ' is so well armoured by the British 
Navy that the danger of a blow to it is so remote as al- 
most to be negligible, and, in the second place, because a 
' self-feeding ' England would not, could not, be the 
same England that we and our fathers before us have 
loved because it is — what it is. 
A Park, Not a Market Garden 
" I mean just this," he continued. " England, 
largely because it imports much of its food, is a ' park ' ; 
every densely populated country which feeds itself — 
Japan, China and Java are good examples — is a ' market 
garden.' There is enough, and more than enough good 
land in England, if it were farmed according to Japanese 
or Javanese practices, to give our forty-live million 
people all the non-tropical products that they now con- 
sume, but to do this we would have to turn the country 
into allotments. Of course we've never had a referendum 
on the question, and I don't recall much discussion of it 
in the Press or in Parliament ; but I think you will find 
that just about gq per cent, of the Englishmen you 
meet — and you will find Overseas Britons as keen on it 
as those at home — will make almost any sacrifice to keep 
England a ' park ' and prevent its conversion into a 
' market garden.' " 
I have come to know the English countryside and the 
English people better than I did at that time, and as a 
consequence do understand not only a point of view 
which at first seemed inexplicable to me, but also I take 
very much the same view myself. It would indeed 
be a pity to convert England from a park to a truck- 
garden merely for the sake of raising at home the food 
which there is every reason to believe can always be 
brought from somewhere else. I should certainly favour 
sticking to the park idea to the end. and I am not, there- 
fore, entering upon even this random and superficial 
discussion of Enghsh agriculture and agricultural prac- 
tices with any suggestion that other than the status quo 
In this respect might be worth considering. 
The world at large — and we Americans in particular-- 
Fiave long been over-prone to mistake the Englishman's 
conservatism— his love of the old, his disUke of change — 
for inflexibility — an unreadiness or even inabiUty to 
change. The war has upset this notion . completely, 
and England's military, industrial and even social adap- 
tability have provned such as it is very possible not even 
America could have equalled. Few indeed are the things 
that have not been remade or actually created at the call 
of exiguous circumstance. Systematisation, standardisa- 
tion, organisation have been the order on every hand, 
and always with the purpose of saving men, of increasing 
efficiency. Two years ago if one advanced a plan to save 
labour in England one was invariably greeted with some- 
thing like this, " \Vhy throw more men out of employ- 
ment when a fifth of our labour is already out of work ? " 
To-day the efficiency expert — the man who can contrive 
to make one man do the work of two, or five, or fifty— 
'. s the most sought-after individtial in Great Britaui. He 
has already left his mark on British manufacturing m- 
dustries to an extent that will tell almost as strongly m 
obliterating the effects of the war as it will in wmnmg it. 
The only great branch of British industry which has 
remained unaffected by the organisation that has quick- 
ened the pulse of all the other branches is agriculture. 
There are two reasons for this, the first being that the 
fanner, the world over, is a conservative of conservatives, 
and therefore always the last in any country to catch step 
in the march of progress. The second reason is that the 
extra demand for foodstuffs created by the war has been 
more easily satisfied from abroad than that for munitions. 
England had to make the bulk of her munitions in any case 
because it was a sheer impossibility to buy from abroad ; 
but with food it has only been a matter of ships and 
money to secure all that was needed at any time. For 
this reason a " speeding-up " of agricultural activity was 
passed over in favour of increased and better applied 
effort in the shops and yards. This was as it should 
have been if one branch of industry had to be neglected 
for another ; yet the fact remains that a better response 
on the part of agriculture to the needs of the occasion 
would have been of great help both in improving the 
exchange and in easing off the pressure on shipping. 
Fortunately, agriculture's turn is only temporarily 
postponed, for there is every reason to believe that the 
new spirit of progressiveness which has transformed 
British workshops in less than two years will shortly 
make itself felt to the end that the land, and the man on 
the land, will have the benefit and advantage of the 
scientific organisation which has accomplished so much 
in other directions. 
The average acre of English land is much better farmed 
than the average acre of American, and the average pro- 
duction per acre is probably from 40 to 75 per cent, 
higher in this country than the United States. The 
acreage production of each acre in Japan and China is 
two or three times as high as in England. Where 
America — and the same applies to Canada and Australia 
—scores, in spite of the fact that her acreage production 
is lower than that of the other countries mentioned, is 
through the comparatively small amount of manual 
effort that such production represents. Even if the 
average American acre produced only half as much as the 
average English one, the fact that for any given number 
of American acres only one man is employed to every 
five or six in England makes the production of the former 
far more economical. 
Before the War 
Before the war the plenitude of labour would have 
militated against any plan to save men on the land in 
just the same way that it did with similar plans for the 
factories. " Why throw more men out of work ? " 
the farmers would have said. But with the surplus 
wiped out, and with an increasing complaint on the score 
of shortage being heard every month, this objection no 
longer has force. This shortage is a good deal more 
apparent than real, for even with the considerable num- 
ber of agricultural labourers that have been called up, 
there are still — even disregarding the very substantial 
number of women now at work on farms — two or three 
times as many men per hundred acres employed on the 
land in England as in the United States or Canada. In 
other words, if the most effective of the man-saving 
practices of these countries had been applied to British 
agriculture in the same way that systematisation has been 
applied to British factories, far from'there being a short- 
age of men at the present moment, still more could be 
spared without seriously threatening production. 
I have sojourned in or travelled leisurely through fully 
two-thirds of the farming counties of England from 
time to time during the last year, and in every one of 
them I observed repeated instances of the wasteful use 
of men at a time' when every daily paper was reporting 
the strenuous efforts the farmers were making in the 
tribunals for the exemption of various of their " in- 
dispensables." I have, by the way, been considerably 
surprised at the extent to which the ploughman appears 
to be rated as an " indispensable," the assumption 
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