FARMS RUN BY OLD MEN
SAYS OXFORD ECONOMIST HALF A MILLION LEAVE LAND [By Air Mail—Special Correspondent! LONDON, 7th January. There are about 250,000 farmers in Britain—approximately the same number as there were 60 years ago. But in the same period the number of employees on farms has been halved, to about 500.000. These figures were quoted this week by Dr. Keith Murray, the Oxford economist, addressing a combined conference of scientists and farmers at Oxford. “Economy in the use of labour has become the keynote of farming today” he declared. No other industry in the country employed so many old men and adolescents with so low a proportion of able-bodied “The management of farming tends to be senile, and its labour to be juvenile.” Agriculture had become such a blind alley occupation for workers, he went on, offering so few real opportunities of promotion or larger responsibilities, that the more educated worker today was almost bound to seek a better chance elsewhere.
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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 31 January 1939, Page 6
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163FARMS RUN BY OLD MEN Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 31 January 1939, Page 6
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