BRITISH FARMERS

Evening Star, Issue 22818, 29 November 1937, Page 13

BRITISH FARMERS

WHY THEY GO BANKRUPT It is a fact. that very few, if any,farms in this-country are making 5 per cent, (profit (writes “ A Farmer,” in an English paper). Probably the majority are being farmed at a loss by men with long experience who work for 13 hours a day and have to be ready for emergencies during the rest of the 24. People who have no knowledge of farming seldom realise the amount of capital necessary. They say that farmers are slow to take advantage of new machinery and new, methods, but they do not realise the expense that is involved in such progress. Let us take as an example the-popu-lar small form of about 100 acres. Today it is mostly grass, with perhaps a few acres of roots and corn, which are grown without loss , because the time spent on them is time taken from jobs such as hedge-cutting and ditch cleaning. ' Not many years ago that farm would have been self-supporting. The ploughshare would have been kept shining, the hedges cut, ditches cleaned. Thistles would have been foreigners. The farmer might even have' had time at - night to walk across bis land for no other reason than to .admire it. To-day, that same tenant, with about £1,500 to £2,000 invested in stock and implements, is worse off than a bricklayer’s labourer. The position of larger farmers is worse. They keep going simply because they cannot do anything else until they go bankrupt—which they are doing with tragic frequency. . You can stop a works and restart :it at your convenience: hut you cannot stop crops growing and restart them. Compare this with the small businessowner who works eight hours a day,; with Sunday and 'Saturday afternoon off, and does not know the trouble of geting out of bed in the middle of the night to attend a maternity case in the shippon or pig-sty, or beginning work at 5.30 a.m. A farmer is born to his life,, and he asks for nothing better. He is prepared to work from dawn until dusk to get in his harvest—and thank Providence for the weather that makes it possible—but he must be entitled to make a living wage. He is producing the food; but he ia not getting the benefit. The consumer is paying a price that would amply repay the farmer, but it is not reaching him. We used to talk about the middlemen ; now we talk about the middlearmy. They have inspectors of various sorts who are perpetually driving their smart cars into, the yard, and wasting the farmer’s time. . The ironical .part of it comes when you realise that the better the quality, of your product the more inspectors there are to hinder you. \ During May (the last figures % quoted by the ‘ Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture’) the prices for milk paid to, the farmer, who pays transit charges, varied from 9d to lOd a gallon, with Id bonus for “ accredited ” producers, '.while the consumer paid 2s a gallon. Think of this: If a dairy farmer sella a little milk round the village he i» labelled a “producer-retailer,” and during May the Milk Board took about' 9Jd a gallon off him, although he . did all the work himself. Simple foods, such as milk, butter* bacon, meat, and vegetables,', ought to be within the reach of every purse. When they leave the farm their price i« • low enough. =■ It is between the farm and the consumer that the profit i* made. It is unprofitable now for dairy farmers to rear their own calves, so there is the wasted expense of taking them into market and buying them ■ back later. . Subsidies are excellent on paper; but' you cannot manage a farm’s internal problems from Whitehall. Only the farmer can manage them. You cannot suddenly change the cropping rotation. You cannot_ suddenly turn an arable farm economically into a. dairy farm, or fatten bullocks on your dairy farm just because Whitehall puts a subsidy on them. ' Leave the domestic part of the fam to the farmer, give him a fair propertion of the consumer’s price, -and this farming problem will fade away.