UNPROFITABLE FARMING

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LX, Issue 88, 7 November 1939, Page 3

UNPROFITABLE FARMING

In his address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir Thomas Middleton, the noted English authority, gave some remarkable examples of the unprofitableness of agriculture, not only in Great Britain but in the United States. For instance, in the wellfarmed area of north-east Scotland, on a group of farms averaging about 450 acres (with 350-375 acres arable) and employing about £10 capital per acre, the farmer's income, after allowing 4 per cent on capital, has only averaged £140 a year over the past nine years. Again in a recent Cambridge survey in the eastern counties, covering 200 farms averaging 163 acres, the average earnings of the farmer, after allowing 4 per cent on capital, were shown in 1938 to be less than £2 a week. Nor are even these earnings cash; for in all cases they include the rental value of produce consumed by the household. In the United States the farmers, after meeting necessary outgoings and wages for themselves at the same rate as for their hired men, earned in 1929 a bare 3.3 per cent return on their invested capital. In each of the three following years they earned less than nothing on it, the annual returns being minus 0.7, minus 2.8, and minus 4.2 per cent respectively.