Profit and Purpose in Farming
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JUN 2 I Ate PROFIT AND PURPOSE IN FARMING A STUDY OF FARMS AND SMALLHOLDINGS IN PART OF THE NORTH RIDING by J. B. BUTLER THE UNIVERSITY 01312DS DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE ECONOMICS SECTION _ - MAY 1960 PROFIT AND PURPOSE IN FARMING A STUDY OF FARMS AND SMALLHOLDINGS IN PART OF THE NORTH RIDING by J. B. BUTLER THREE SHILLINGS CONTENTS Foreword PART I THE FARMS Page Introduction • •• • •• ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• 5 The Modal Type of Farming ... ••• ••• ••• ••• 9 Variation from the Modal Type •• • ••• ••• ••• 18 Financial Results of Different Farming Systems ••• ••• 21 The Causes of Variation... ••• ••• ••• • •• 32 Conclusions ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• • •• ••• 44 PART II THE SMALLHOLDINGS Holdings under 50 acres... ••• ••• ••• •• • • •• 48 The Small Farmer Scheme ••• ••• •• • • •• ••• 62 Comparison with the West Riding ... ••• ••• ••• 64 Conclusions ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• 66 APPENDIX List of Parishes in the Survey Area ••• ••. ••• ••• 68 3 FOREWORD To farm successfully, within the economic meaning of success, a farmer must pay attention to the type of fanning which he should follow, to the size of his business, and to the efficiency with which he prosecutes it. A wealth of material has been accumulated in recent years to provide standards to help farmers and their advisors to judge whether individual farms are turning to the most profitable use the labour, machinery, feeding stuffs and other resources employed on their holdings. Much less time has been given to studying whether the system itself is the most profitable of the alternative systems that might be followed. This is the object of the present report which concerns itself particularly with the reasons why a certain district in the North Riding of Yorkshire, selected because of its apparent homo- geneity, in fact revealed a variety of systems. Not all were equally profitable, and Mr. J. B. Butler has gone in considerable detail into the reasons which have led some farmers to adhere to systems which give less in material rewards than those followed by many of their neighbours. Mr. Butler has also studied some aspects of the size of farms in the area. Those of less than 50 acres comprised as much as 48 per cent of the total number of officially designated agricultural holdings. The opportunities for making a satisfactoryincome on them are necessarily limited by their small size, but the study reveals that in fact only a quarter of them were occupied by full-time farmers. The others were either farmed by people who had an alternative occupation, or were pieces of land occupied as part of a private residence. While the job of an economist is to view problems primarily from the aspect of the use that is made of scarce resources, it is nevertheless frequently essential for him to study the motives which cause members of society to take certain decisions which it may 1?.e suspected are not economic. In this North Riding study Mr. Butler draws attention to some of the facets of farming that make it a living as well as a business. Acknowledgement must be made to those farmers in the area who were good enough to discuss these problems in the light of their own experience, and to Messrs. W. S. Rayfield, I. Kinloch and H. T. Shaw, members of the National Agricultural Advisory Service in the North Riding who gave both advice in developing the study, and infor- mation regarding details of the area. The collection of the material on which Part II of this report is based was done mainly by I. G. Simpson, A. Oldfield, L. W. Bolton, E. G. Hunt, Jean Radford, Gwendoline Burtonshaw and Margaret Wright. HARWOOD LONG May, 1960. 4 PART I INTRODUCTION It is frequently assumed that types of farming are closely assoc- iated with the physical and climatic conditions of the areas in which they occur. If we are dealing with very wide geographical variations this is obviously true: tropical, sub-tropical and temperate areas, for example, all have their own characteristic farming types; and even within much narrower ranges the general tendency holds good. The predominance of grassland in the wetter western part of the British Isles compared with the arable cropping found in the drier eastern areas, for instance, is largely due to climatic differences. In this case, however, the farming systems are much less clearly distinct and a good deal of overlapping occurs. Nevertheless there have been numerous attempts to distinguish "type of farming areas" on an even narrower basis, and much of our thinking about farming problems rests on the assumption that certain types of farming are closely associated with specific areas, and that the pattern of agricultural production within these areas is, in fact, largely uniform. An example of this approach is the Ministry of Agriculture's Types of Farming Map of England and Wales, published by The Land Utilisation Survey in 1941. This divides the whole country into 200 areas according to the predominant system of farming found in each. These are then classified into seventeen types, based on the proportion of arable land and the nature of the dominant and secondary enterprises. The aim is to give a picture of the predom- inant farming systems in different parts of the country. It is recognised that considerable variation occurs within each type area, but little is known about the extent or nature of this variation or the reasons for its occurrence. The present study sets out to answer, for one small area in Yorkshire, the following three questions: 1. What is the predominant type of farming in the area? 2. How much variation is there from the modal type? 3. What are the reasons for the variations which occur? The area selected is situated in the northern part of the Plain of York, and is classed as an area of general mixed farming on the Ministry's map. Its suitability for the purpose of the study is due to its uniformity of soil and other natural conditions, and to the presence of a well marked type of farming. At the same time, it is a district where natural conditions would permit the establishment of almost any system if economic or other circumstances required it, so that the type of farming is not dictated by factors beyond the control of the farmers. 5 THE SURVEY AREA The area lies in the Plain of York between the towns of Ripon, Boroughbridge, Thirsk and Bedale, and extends along both sides of the Great North Road. It includes 29 parishes and 339 holdings and covers an area of about 65 square miles, of which some 36,000 acres are under crops and grass. The land is mainly level, with only slight undulations and varies from 50 feet to 200 feet in elevation, with the greater part not above 100 feet. The soil varies considerably from light sandy barns to rather wet and heavy types, but most of the land consists of medium, well drained barns and there are no large areas unsuitable for arable farming. Table 1 shows the land use pattern of the area as a whole.* TABLE 1 LAND USE OF THE SURVEY AREA (as returned at 4th June 1958) Total acreage of- Crops and grass •• • •• • •• • 35,413 Rough grazings •• • •• • •• • 685 Percentage of crops and grass area in- °A Wheat ••• ••• ••• ••• 5 Barley ••• ••• ••• ••• 20 Other corn ... ••• ••• ••• 8 Total corn ••• ••• ••• 33 Potatoes ••• ••• ••• 7 Sugar beet ... ••• ••• ••• 5 Fodder crops, etc. ••• ••• ••• 6 Temporary grass ••• ••• ••• 15 Permanent grass ••• ••• 34 100 Numbers per 100 acres of- Dairy cows ... ••• ••• ••• 3 Other cattle ... ••• ••• ••• 27 Pigs ... ••• ••• ••• ••• 31 Ewes ... ••• ••• ••• ••• 20 Other sheep ••• ••• ••• 29 Poultry ••• ••• ••• ••• 316 The farming is predominantly arable. Corn growing is important, barley being the main corn crop as much of the land is somewhat light for wheat. The chief feature of the cropping is, however, a high proportion of potatoes and sugar beet. The latter crop is mainly * This table is based on the June 4th returns for 1958. The rest of the analysis discussed in this report uses the figures for 1955 which were the latest available when the investigation was planned. Sample comparisons indicate no material change since 1955. 6 grown for the factory at York, and the benefits obtained from the use of tops for stock feed and,to a less degree,the pulp(either wet or dried) are an important consideration in the growth of the crop, in view of its relatively low profit compared with potatoes. Dairy herds are rarely kept On these farms, but beef cattle, either home reared or purchased as stores, are nearly always found and perform the dual function of utilising grass and of providing farmyard manure for the root crops. Sheep are kept on a number of farms, and usually consist of a breeding flock running on grass, the lambs being sold fat during the summer. Sometimes some hoggs are purchased for feeding on beet tops or fodder crops in the winter. Pigs and poultry are kept on many of the fauns. The above brief account describes what appeared from a superficial examination, to be the typical farming system. One of the objectives of the study was to endeavour to give a more precise account of the matter by isolating a modal type. THE DATA The first analysis was based on the Ministry of Agriculture's Returns for June 1955. These showed that the area contained 339 holdings in the following size groups. Under 10 acres 103 holdings, or 30 per cent 10-19 ,, 22 „ 7 1, 11 20-49 lf 36 " Y1 50-149 „ 88 „ 26 150-249 „ 52 „ 15 250-349 „ 20 „ 6 l! 350 acres and over 18 „ 5 7, 339 100 Where more than one return clearly referred to a single holding, the separate units were combined to arrive at the above distribution, but a few composite holdings may have been missed.