28 Jour7zal of Agricultural Economics.

only occasionally rather than once a week, but the County and other locd Shows occasioned an annual visit from thirteen. Apart from the N.F.U., t o which thirteen farmers belonged, membership of societies was limited to only three of those interviewed. The same three only, attended N.F.U. meetings and they were all comparatively successful managers.

The evidence of this enquiry suggests that all these farmers were tolerably well exposed to mass media, but that many of them failed to absorb information into their own farming. They look over several fences, but do not put into practice what they see. They may well regard it as not applicable to their own case. If so, this probably explains why only four of these farmers claimed to get regular advice from the N.A.A.S. ; seven only occasionally, at intervals up to two years, and commonly for specific purposes such as silage making, soil tests, and the like ; while the rest denied ever having used the advisory service at all. This need not mean that advice had not, at one time, been offered. If the thesis of this discussion is correct, it would, in many cases, not have been taken unless the philosophy of the farmer had first been changed by a deliberate campaign to alter values rather than techniques.

CONCLUSION. One may perhaps close with some suggestions how the situation of these

farmers might be improved by advisory work. They all spring from the assumption, proved or not in these pages, that there is a large number of small farmers whose attitudes to the business side of farming are faulty, or who do not see developments as applicable to their own farms, and are suspicious of advisers who, they know, spend part of their time on larger holdings which they regard, rightly but often for the wrong reasons, as an entirely different management problem ; and that such farmers are likely to form a fairly close social group. If this is true, then special courses confined t o farmers with less than 75 acres, which concentrate first on the use of capital, might be the ideal, especially if these could be conducted by a " small farm advisory officer." Such courses might be conducted locally or residentially at farm institutes. Better perhaps, special encouragement might be given to small farmers' sons to attend short courses at farm institutes, which should, however, use a small, rather than the institute farm, for demonstration purposes, and have farm management as their central theme. In addition, the much maligned pilot farm might be put to good use, provided it could be selected so that the general run of local small farmers feel that they can do as well themselves. In other words, they should know the farmer and not have too high an opinion of his wealth or ability.

Finally, mainly for illustration of the possibilities of such research, inferences have admittedly been drawn quite freely from limited data, based on a very small sample of farms ; and if some bias in favour of helping the small farmer is apparent, after many interesting and enjoyable conversations with those who are said to constitute the small farmer problem, I am inclined to be unrepentant. In any event there is clearly a need for more and wider based research of this kind.

DISCUSSION ON MR. CARPESTER'S PAPER D. B. Wallace May I be the first to congratulate Mr. Carpenter on his paper and particularly his

courage in launching forth on a subject which when it has been raised in discussion before, has met with a good deal of derision. I think myself i t is a subject of extreme interest and one that has been greatly neglected in our professional work in this country. When I was working on the economics of the small farm projects which all departments undertook last year, it struck me at the time that this phrase that (' there is no problem of the small

Journal of Agricultural Economics, 29

farm, the problem is the small farmer” which we have bandied about a good deal between us is very true. 1 was verv much struck for instance in one of the records that came through our hands to find a f a 4 which seemed to be a hybrid between an extremely extensive holding, considering its size. and a Small section of extreme intensity. I went to investigate penonally and found that i t was a father-and-son holding where the father, an old man with of the tithe wars, was farming the extensive section. His son, who had h e n a prisoner on the holding during the ’thirties, had managed to escape under the all-embracing umbrella of National Service and entered the -4.E.C‘s training school, and from there he had seen wider horizons and it had occurred to him that fertilisers and so on could be used. He, in fact, was farming the small intensive section a t the other end of the farm and living in the nearest town. Had the son had possession of the whole farm, because of the influences which had been brought to bear upon him at the formative tirne of his life, that holding would have been vastly more profitable and more productive and madc much greater use of natural resources than could ever be the case as long as his father was alive. living in his memories of twenty and thirty years ago. Obviously we can all repeat this sort of thing from our own experiences. But all this information is in bits and pieces and the isthe first attempt that I have met, in this Society, to try and formalise

I t seems to me that by far the most important part of the paper is the section dealing with the desire to remain in farming almost come what may. Certainly for any policy work in the future, for any idea that we may require a change in the distribution of farm size in this country, we need to know, I think, a great deal more about the motivation of the farmer, what keeps him where he is, what brings him into the industry and what, if possible, would push him out. So I come to a suggestion in support of Mr. Carpenter’s plea for further work in this field. I should like to suggest that the P.A.E’s Conference might see how many Departments would be prepared to take part in a combined operation to collect data from across the country instead of limiting them to one or two piovinces. If they would work together, and I believe they could, we should takc advice from the professionals in this line, namely, people like the Social Survey of the Central Office of Information, in designing a questionnaire so as to make sure that we all ask the same questions, in training the interviewers to have more or less the same approach, and in assisting us t o interpret the answers. I think we could make a good contribution to the small farm problem and to an understanding of the farmer’s mentality, but I feel that an individual or a piecemeal approach in individual provinces would not get us anywhere near so f a r along the road as a combined survey OI this type.

of i t and bring it together.

D. W. Cooper : Mr. Carpenter has mentioned three basic reasons why some farmers fall short in their

management, defining management in this context as a capacity for organisation leading t o high profits. The reasons he suggests are :-

Personal incapacity ; Non-commercial aims ; Lack of knowledge of the techniques of farm management.

I would like to expand the third reason a little more widely to include a lack of commercial farm management. with the accent on the word “ commercial.” Today more than ever the farmer is in business as a buyer and seller as well as a producer. Without proper commercial management his business is akin to a manufacturer who has no proper sales organisation. Increased production is not much use to a farmer-production gives no benefits unless i t is profitably sold.

This combination-the small unit, the outlook of the small farmer and lack of commeicial acumen-places a large proportion of our farmers in a weak position, i.e. that of buying retail and selling wholesale. I t is not enough for the farmer to be cost conscious. It is net enough to try and make 3 lbs. of meal do where 3) was used before, without looking at the price a t which the meal was purchased. The speaker has emphasised that the problem is not so much one of the small farm as one of the small farmer, and I have suggested that the lack of commercial acumen or the opportunity to use i t may be a particularly valid factor in hindering the maximisation of farm profits in the case of the small farmer. This highlights the need to maximise farm profits through better buying of the tools and raw materials of production and better selling of produce, better services, better grading. presentation and packing, better market intelligence and better bargaining power. These are the fields for co-operative action among farmers.

The reason why farmers may fall short in this aspect of organisation leading to higher profits may also be explained by the psychological and social reasons already mentioned by Mr. Carpenter which have meant adherence to traditional methods of trade and old market channels. This is certainly the case with the older generation of small farmers.

30 Jozcrnal of Agricultural Economics.

What about the new generation of small farmers who have learned their business since t h e war ? Here I think a lot of the answer, and the answer to many of the problems propounded by Mr. Carpenter, lies in agricultural education.

There has been in the past a lack of training in farm management. This is now rapidly being put right, but there is still a dearth of training in commercial farm manage- ment. The present outlook of formal agricultural education and advisory services has been strongly influenced by the war-time and post-war emphasis on increasing production. Advisory officials and lecturers, themselves largely trained in this period have tended to be predominantly production conscious. This has been reflected too in the outlook of administrators of Government departments and local education authorities. Changes in these artitudes tend to lag behind changes in overall agricultural trends as they affect o r should affect formal education.

The Government services advised on techniques of increasing production ; research was directed mainly to production ; in agricultural education there was consequently a similar strong emphasis upon production, the distribution angle being largely ignored. To some extent this new accent has reached formal agricultural education in the shape of increased attention to problems of farm management, but farm commercial management is still relatively untouched. Questions of presentation, marketing and agricultural organisation are still rather cursorily dealt with-subjects leceiving much more attention in the United States for example.

The extent to which new attitudes have appeared in agricultural education and advisory services has depended largely on the awareness and interest of the teachers and adviseis, but overall it would be a fair comment that the changing circumstances in agricultural affairs have tended to move only slowly into the system of agricultural education.

Mr. Carpenter has also strongly suggested that the problem is one of attitudes as much as one of techniques. He suggested that changed attitudes would significantly improve the position, and I wholeheartedly agree with him on this. I would disagree, however, that the advantages of changed attitudes cannot be demonstrated. Maybe they cannot be demonstrated so easily a s new techniques, but in this field the expansion and increasing acceptance of agricultural co-operation is a convincing demonstration of changed attitudes. I will not take up your time by narrating examples, but perhaps I may mention one in the field of the co-operative use of machinery. This is a job which people have always said just won’t work, but in recent years there have been started in several southern counties a t least a dozen small syndicates of farmers jointly purchasing and using farm machinery.

Mr. Carpenter had the courage to forecast that the techniques of human relations will have a significant part to play in an industry where they are barely known and maybe even in some places derided. He has spotlighted most admirably the problem of the small farmer. I have only added two other ideas which may take us some way towards a solution.

More commercial training in agricultural education, and an increasing awareness among farmers of the possibilities of co-operative action.

Mrs. D. I . S. Richardson : I feel that the small farmer problem is really more sociological than economic, for we

all know that the answer to the small farmer’s economic problem is either amalgamation or intensification, and as Mr. Carpenter has pointed out the farmers in his sample could have expanded had they so wished.

The problem as I see i t is this-why do these farmers persist in t q h g to eke out a living on these small farms, and why are their families prepared to put up with such a low standard of living ? Why don’t they give up farming and take up employment elsewhere ?

From my own experience I would say that these are the sociological reasons for their persistance in remaining on their farms.

The small family farm is a single social unit and the family working it is inalienably associated with it. They would be extremely reluctant to leave the farm since the same family may have farmed the same land for many generations. Following from this there are the ties of kinship in a n y rural community which are extremely strong for family reasons or for good neighbour reasons. In any parish in the upland areas of Wales most of the farmers will be related in either the first or the second degree. There is ,$ tremendous community feeling which is very well illustrated by the Welsh saying that If you tread on the tail of a dog a t one end of a valley in Wales, i t will bark at the other end.’’ This community feeling gives to the individual a sense of security in belonging to the village, and this factor inhibits movement from these uneconomic farms. People are afrad of moving to the unknown industrial towns since they will have observed how strangers

Journul of Agricultural Economics. 31

are treated in their own close knit community. In Wales I think that it takes 10-15 years before one is accepted !

The fear of moving is also caused by lack of imagination which is a feature of the rural mind, and is a reflection of the low standard of rural education. There is no training for any occupation other thao agriculture.

Pride and independence are also two very important reasons for the persistence of the small fmer- they prefer to make their own decisions and they make great play of this. They also have a feeling of security in living the same pattern of life as their fathers before them, and also they can look with some confidence to the future since they know that they will be able to sell all their produce a t least a t the guaranteed minimum price available.

Rural debt also acts as a brake on easy movement from the farm. Many of these small farmers are in heavy debt to their corn merchants. Many, also, purchased their farms at the high prices prevailing after the war, and they feel that if they sell up they will not be able to pay their debts. They prefer to go on as they are rather than face up to being declared bankrupt, since this would cause them to lose face in the community and it ,vould reflect badly on the family group. I don’t think we should underrate this business of ’’ loss of face ” in the rural areas since i t plays such an important psychological part in farmers’ decision making.

We also come up against the question of why the sons stay on the farm, since the fathers, who are middle-aged, married, and have every intention of staying on the farm until they die, obviously will never leave. Farmers, as we know, don’t retire-they die. I think that the first son remains and is prepared to accept low wages because he knows that he will inherit some day. Most sons do not marry until they inherit the farm, therefore they do not wish to set up home elsewhere. The other sons will in all probability lack sufficient money t o move to the town, since the fathers keep them so short. Usually a move of this kind requires the minimum of resources for maintenance over a period of change, and probably requires the psychological element of confidence to set oneself up in a new identity and surroundings.

There are many other reasons of course which I shall not mention-such as religion, depopulation, etc.-but I think that I should mention one of the most important factors in the persistence of these farmers in staying on their small farms. If their wives did not wish to stay, then they would have to move. In the only two cases recently where farmers I know have sold up, the move was caused by the wife’s dissatisfaction and I know that the farmers would never have sold if their wives had not felt very strongly about it. Although the life on these farms is very hard on the women, they are prepared to put up with it for the same reasons as the men, and they are even more strongly influenced by the blood ties and feeling of kinship with the community in which they live, since in all probability they were born in it.

T. R. L. Fraser : A t the end of the discussion on milk production this morning the President asked

whether any rational explanation lay behind a farmer’s decisions. I think that is the crux of Mr. Carpenter’s very interesting paper. The fact that 20 per cent. of Mr. Carpenter’s sample had an average of &SO0 in current account, not even in deposit account, shows, I think, that at least on a very large number of small farms commercial aims are very significant. I think that that is probably true of a larger number than is indicated in Mr. Carpenter’s sample.

I wonder if any of the liaison officers present would care to tell us what percentage of the cases they deal with are small farmers ? I know i t will differ in various areas in the country, but I doubt if i t is proportional to the number of small farmers in the country.

Mr. Carpenter suggests that many small farmers do not use advisory services because they feel that the advice that will be given to them is not likely to be applicable in their case. Inevitably farm management advisory work had to start with larger farms, among farmers who were more commercially minded, and I think that has been to the detriment of farm management advisory work. I do not blame advisers-it was inevitable. But surely if anything emerges out of Mr. Carpenter’s paper i t is this-that what is needed is a drive to make sure that small farmers realise what the possibilities and potentialities of their position are, and to show them how to set their sights much higher. We should also try and get amongst the advisory services, both N.A.A.S. and advisory services belonying to the commercial firms, an appreciation of all the sociological factors which have been mentioned by Mrs. Richardson that lie behind the small farmer’s outlook. I t is because this two-pronged attack is so necessary that I think Mr. Carpenter’s suggestion of a small farm advisory officer is most welcome.

32 Journal of Agricultural Economics.

G. F. Hendry : I want to say something on Mr. Carpenter’s paper because I feel it has been most

interesting and timely. It has drawn our attention very forcibly to the human resources as well as the material resources of the small farm. I t so happens that we made an attempt in Scotland last year to study these human resources on some of our financial accounts farms-though not on as detailed or scientific a basis as Mr. Carpenter-and to assess at the same time the physical attributes of the farms themselves.

I should perhaps say first that I work for the Department of Agriculture for Scotland and that direct approach to farmers in the accounting scheme was ruled out. We therefore approached the College economists and asked them to assess six factors applying to the farmer and six factors relating to the farm, using their own knowledge of the farmer and farm, but not of course disclosing to us the identity of farm or farmer. As regards the farmer we asked them to assess age, health, education, technical and practical ability. business ability, and drive and application. As to the farm, we asked them to assess soil, climate, location, lay-out, adequacy of power supplies and buildings.

We attempted this for a larger sample than Mr. Carpenter was able to deal with-for 150 small farmers in fact. Half of them were successful by the L500 net income standard and half were unsuccessful. We asked the College economists to say whether each of the factors that had been listed had a favourable or unfavourable effect on income, and to estimate the degree of that effect. We recognised, of course, that the judgments were subjective, and Mr. Carpenter has told us tonight what his opinions are of such subjective judgments. But we were not trying to do a precise job, but merely to see whether it was the farm or the farmer which was a t the root of the small farm problem. For that limited purpose the subjective judgment is, I think, of value, and i t may interest the Society if I say briefly what we found.

We summarised the factors affecting the farm and the farmer into an assessment of each as good, average or poor. In the successful group of farms 60 per cent. of the farmers and 30 per cent. of the farms were rated as good. In the unsuccessful group, half the farms and a quarter of the farmers were rated as poor. So I think it is legitimate to say that though there are many poor farmers on small farms, the most common cause of low income in Scotland is the farm itself. On the other hand the dominant factor on the successful farms turned out to be the farmers themselves. Indeed, 40 per cent. of the successful farms were rated only poor or average, but were successful because they were farmed by farmers rated as good.

Second, we found that the gap between the good and the not so good is much greater in farmers than in farms. The qualities the poor farmers lacked most strikingly were those of business and technical ability and this makes me a little less optimistic than Mr. Carpenter is at the end of his paper. I think it is difficult to see how the return on these unsuccessful small farms farmed by poor farmers can be improved during the tenancy of their present occupiers.

K . Rasmussen : We have heard quite a lot about asking small farmers, and often poor managers,

what factors they think would lead to success in farm management. How many of you, if you were ill, would like to gather the opinion of persons who suffered from the same illness as to what is wrong with you ? I do not think you can expect to get any valid information by asking the patient. It must be the job of the doctor to study the symptoms. We have heard that the small farmer patients are quite happy from both Mr. Carpenter and NLrs. Richardson. Then Mr. Fraser tells us we ought to go out and make them unhappy ; we ought to have a special advisory service and we ought to enforce our advice upon them. Very few of these small farmers come to our Department for advice, and i t is not within my concept of our functions that we should enforce advice upon unwilling patients.

B. E. Cracknell: I would also like to thank Mr. Carpenter for his very interesting paper, and for his

courage in presenting it. I had something to do with the preparation of this study last year on the small farm and one of the fist things we decided before we even started work was that we must avoid the mistake of thinking‘of the problem of the ’’ small farm.” We decided that the problem was not so much the small farm ” as such but the small farm business. The emphasis throughout the study w a s placed on the value of output which was used for convenience as a guide to income. Surely that is the right way to look a t the problem.

Does Mr. Carpenter really think that there are 126,000 small farm problems ? He himself quotes figures which show that four of his sample of l8,,farmers have television sets. Look a t the incomes of some of these so-called ‘:,problem farms. Some have net incomes of about Al.000. Are these really “ problem farms 1 Mr. Carpenter uses the

Journal of Agricultural Economics. 33

phrase " The problem of small farms " which is merely perpetuating the misconception we thought we had killed when we used the term " small farm business."

But 1 am not sure now whether even the I ' small farm business " approach is adequate if it ignores non-farm sources of income. I read only the other day that in the United States 62 per cent. of the farmers have income from other sources than farming (Ref, Agrarwortschaft, No., 1957, P. 349). Now. I have never seen any figures for this country which show how many of our many smaller farmers have other sources of income than from farming, but I know it must be a lot. I contributed towards it myself last year by staying on a small farm in Wales ; for myself, my wife and my two children I paid some- thing like Lao a week to the farmer and discovered to my surprise that he was a bus driver and drove a bus all day long, coming home to milk the ten cows in the evening. He must making an additional L200/5300 a year net income during the summer period in this way. Is he a problem small farmer ? I think we ought to have more research on this aspect of the problem. At least some attempt should be made to get an estimate for this country of the number of farmers who do have other sources of income, and the relative importance of farm or non-farm sources of income on small farms.

R. Dudmas : I would like to offer Mr. Carpenter my congratulations on his paper, and to support

his suggestion that this is a field of study to which we ought to pay more attention. We probably know much less about farmers' psychology than we sometimes like to think. But I do not think we should attach too great a value to I.Q. tests as possible tools in such studies-there is no evidence to suggest a relationship between intelligence quotient and success in business.

E. M . Carpenter : I must thank Mr. Wallace for underlining the main purpose of my paper. It was not

so much to prove that particular ettitudes or attributes prevail, as to illustrate both the need and the practicability of basing judgments of farmers' characteristics on something better than opinion, or merely by inference from the results of their decisions. I hope i t may lead to wider and more precise investigations than my small pilot survey.

I entirely agree that if such enquiries are to be undertnken on a larger scale, expert advice, as for example, from the Social Survey, should be sought. I believe, however, that, since our primary interest is economic, we may benefit more from such consultation after a trial run of our own. Even so, it was because of my inexperience that I did not try to establish minimum levels of income acceptable for these farmers to continue in business. It would require specialised skill to ensure that the standard of living implications of any income deemed adequate were recognised.

Mr. Cooper is wrong in thinking that I suggested that the advantages of changed Attitudes cannot be demonstrated. I think :hat they must be, or this kind of research will lose much of its practicd justification. and I wish I had myself thought of his example to show that they can. Hr rightly emphajises that education is the tool to bring about changed attitudes, but I am less confident than he is, and I know the N.I.A.S. is also, that it is only a matter of time bekore current advisory techniques bear fruit in the more fertile soil of the younger generation on small farms. For what it is worth, my own investigation did not suggest that sons had very different attitudes from their fathers.

Of course every small acreage farm is not necessarily a small business, as Mr. Cracknell rightly reminds us, but if you exclude specialists and hill farms, there are likely to be more small businesses on acreages ilnder than over 100. I do not pretend to know the proportion of problem farms within this population, but they are there and challenge the advisory services to break down resistance to management advice. I am very glaFf, there- fore, to have Mr. Fraser's support for the idea of a " small farm advisory officer. There are plenty of N.-%.-%.S. district officers made for the job, who may yet fail, because the small farmers do not regard them as their own men.

Such an adviser, however, needs to be forearmed with the sort of knowledge of the characteristics of small farmers, which would be provided by the kind of research I advocate. That these characteristics may differ between districts is suggested by my own conclusion that debt was no brake on progress ; the exact opposite of Mrs. Richardson's impression in Wales.

I am not a t all sure that Mr, Hendry's investigation w d much less detailed or scientific than my own ; nor do I think that subjective judgments can be entirely avoided in this kind of work, though they should obviously be kept to a minimum. My point is that judgment should be based on something better than opinion. I t does seem possible, however, that farmers' technical and business ability was judged by inference from their performance, rather than as a potential. If so, his findings would not invalidate my own

34 Journal of Agricultural Economics.

tentative conclusion that attitudes rather than innate capacity are, in many cases, the cause of inefficiency.

I do not believe that Mr. Rasmussen really wants to deny all responsibility for the fourth factor of production. Certainly I am not prepared to. A t the same time I agree that it is not our job to force advice on farmers, but I do not think anyone has really suggested that we should. My idea is that i t must be someone's duty to make sure why advice is not sought or accepted ; and if this is because farmers cannot see their own interests clearly, or are unaware that useful advice is available, then it may well be the function of an advisory service to lighten this imperfect knowledge.

The question of techniques of investigation or whether we are the right people to do this research brings us back to the Social Survey experts. They would be better qualified than I to answer Mr. Rasmussen's other point, that we do not ask the patient what disease he has, we ask the doctor. If he means that he is uneasy about the practical value of the techniquc , used by some workcrs, which consists of obtaining from farmers ratings of the influence of various attributes on success or failure, I personally concur. If, however, he means thnt we should not ask the patient for symptoms, you will have to agree that this is exactly what the doctor does. That i= why I tried to deal as far as possible with facts rather than opinions.

This, however, is obviously a matter for psychologists and sociologisb to settle. For this reason, though I am glad to think, with Mr. Dudman, that we can avoid the use of I.Q. ratings and some other psychological techniques. I am certain that we should not embark on any widespread invzstigation without consulting the Social Survey. Indeed, provided we can establish the need for such an enquiry, to be canied out with the object of getting bettei understanding of the management factor, I should be happy to leave the task to opinion survey experts, if they in turn would also be prepared first to make sure they understood what I was trying to get at.