426 Journal of Agricuh4ral Economics.

DISCUSSION ON MR. HENDRY’S PAPER. Dr. J. F. Duncan:

It was a mistake on my part to sit down too near the front with the result that I came under the eye of the Chairman and was called upon to open the discussion. The only pleasure it gives me is to congratulate Mr. Hendry on what is really the 6rst compre- hensive study of the labour situation in Scotland. I have nothing bu t praise for the work that he has done and I am quite sure that other people who are a t all interested in labour problems will agree that he has done a fine piece of work. When I say that, I am not accepting all these manipulations of figures at the end about output, and all the things that I’m not qualified to judge and I thoroughly distrust. But when he is dealing with t h e decrease in the labour force, and with the wages in Scotland, he has not made any bloomers at all and that I think is a remarkable tribute for a man who has got to sit in an office and handle figures which field workers bring to him.

I shall make only a few comments on Mr. Hendry’s paper. He comments on the figures for family and hired workers which were collected from 1941 to 1952 and asks whether the variations in the number of family workers was due to the higher farm standards of living. I suggest that the sequence of events can be more directly related to the fact that farm workers, family and hired alike, were not liable for military service.

I think it was unfortunate that the figures for both categories were not continued after 1952. I protested at the time and was assured that from time to time the numbers would be shown separately in the agricultural returns, but I still think the annual return should have been given.

It is good to see that the age structure is improving. We had always too many lads. too few men in their prime, and too many old men, particularly farmers, in Scottish agriculture. It used to be one of the worst blind alley occupations recruiting too many young lads and turning them away at 17 and 18 years of age., W e are now recruiting no more than is adequate if we are to maintain a sufficient number of men a t the requisite ages, but it is clear that we are no longer going to have the same easy recruitment as in the past. We shall have to take more positive action to recruit and train the necessary labour force. And we shall have to pay more attention to the problem why it is so difficult to keep workers in farming. There is no single factor we can put our finger on. Higher wages do not attract more workers, and do not retain those on the farms. What we need is a thorough study of the whole problem, and more factual information to test popular opinions.

About wages: we have to be very careful in making comparisons between wages in different countries, because so often we are comparing different things which have been given the same name. I distrust average wages for whole. countries, and for classi- fications of workers. I would like Mr. Hendry t o work out the wages for different counties in Scotland, but in doing so care will have to be exercised to make sure that the classi6cations mean the same thing in the different counties.

Another warning is necessary in comparing rates of wages with other occupations. There is the usual warning that rates of wages may vary more than earnings and in Scottish far* wages there is the valuation of benefits. These are valued a t wholesale prices, and the value of house varies from 2s. 6d. to 6s. a week inclusive of rates. The range given by Mr. Hendry of 18s. to 12s. has to be very carefully handled in any comparisons.

I want to thank Mr. Hendry again and to encourage him to go into further aspects of farm labour and provide us with further data on which something can be done.

A.J. Wpm: I should first of all like to thank Mr. Hendry for what I think is an extremely

competent paper, one which covers an extremely wide field. There are several points I should like to raise. I think I had better start off by crossing swords with Dr. Duncan because he raised one of the points in which I am rather interested. I think that first of all while it may be true about horseman or tractor driver not putting in his extra 5 of 7 hours a week, there is no difficulty whatever in the horseman working an average of 54 hours a week, and on this minimum rate he is only getting 11s. for what is equivalent to 8# hours overtime in summer and 12) hours overtime in winter. It is an average of less than 1s. 6d. an hour.

One interesting thing which Mr. Hendry did not mention. Most of us thought that in Scotland winter went on for 9 months and summer was restricted to 3 months or less. but I find in studying wages orders that summer lasts for 9 months and winter only lasts for 3 months, a t an average of 48 hours in summer and 44 hours in winter, that the minimum rate is 47 and not 46 exactly the same as the English hours. But we in England got rid of this pernicious system of guaranteeing a subminimum rate for overtime

Journal of Agricultural Economics. 427

stockmen 10 years ago and I think that part of the people in Scotland would be a good deal better off if they got rid of i t too. But quite apart from that, the thing that hits one in the eye with all these figures is how shockingly badly farmers pay their workers and how very little they are prepared to offer for skilled work. The proof of the pudding is, of course, that they are leaving the land very fast. No arguments as to how much better off they are than the figures show alters the fact that they are leaving the land. Our President referred to the question of cowmanship. But how much does a good cowman get paid? One of the things that we as agricultural economists ought to be considering very much more seriously than we do, is the question of quality of labour as opposed to quantity of labour. The reason why stockmen are hard to get who are really good is because they are not trained; one man in 100 may be a naturally good stockman, but i f you take 100 of them and put them through a good course of training you will get 90 of them as good stockmen, but a t the moment farmers are not prepared to pay the sort of premium that a really skilled man should get, which is probably a t least 50 per cent. above labourers' rate and it might be twice as much. My own view is, and I would like to have it tested, that a really skilled man employed at twice the average rate would pay the farmer very well,

Dr. J . F. Duncan: I think that any competent dairyman today in Scotland will get L12 a week.

A . J . Wynne: That does not come out in the average figures that Mr. Hendry has given us.

Dr. J . F. Duncan: The average masks it.

A . J . Wynnc: There are a few questions I would like to put to Mr. Hendry. Firstly, he gives a figure

of L17.4 million spent on machinery per annum. Is it purchases plus running costs, or is i t depreciation plus running costs?

The second question refers to Table 16: is this investment in equipment an average of the opening and closing valuations. If not, how is it arrived at?

Again, what year has been chosen for the constant year in Table 14? This is an important point because without it we cannot really compare these figures with Dr. Wibberley's.

There is just one other point that I would like to,make and that is to compare the figures in Table 17 ' net increment per man on farms with the figures that I produced to the Society a little while ago. I think that the figures are not very dissimilar but are reasonably comparable. Two differences, however, come out between English and Scottish agriculture. One is the abysmally low figure in Scotland for small stock rearing farms. We do not seem to have anything quite as bad as that. The other is the remarkably good results from the large dairy farms. I would like to know if anybody has any comments to make on this. Is it that the management of big dairy farms is much better in Scotland or is it that we have got to revise our ideas about the Ayrshire cow? Certainly Scottish dairy farmers seem to be in a position to teach English dairy farmers something.

W . Cowley: I, too, was a bit worried at first by the wages presented here. I have always had a

great admiration for Scottish farmers, they have a wonderful business in pedigree stock and in seed potatoes, and I thought if they were getting away with these wages as well, then they were brilliant. But Dr. Duncan has cleared that matter up because it is quite ridiculous for the last speaker to consider that farmers are paying so little to their men in England or in Scotland. If you just offer the minimum wage you do not get much labour. Certainly with us a good cowman gets L8 to ,tlO plus bonus and I think that most people will pay about that.

R. Dlruidson : I would like to say how interested I have been in Mr. Hendry's paper because I am

very pleased to see that he has devoted a whole section to the stock rearing farms. I t has been those farms that I have been exclusively concerned with since I have been in this country. I know nothing about the Scottish farms but I have done some work on their counterparts in Wales. I am interested in his ??sumption that t? stock rearing farms have too much labour. If you take a figure for as a gauge for labour, obviously they have too much. My Welsh friends told me the same thing, that

output per man

4.28 Journal of Agricultural Economics. their output per man was much lower than the lowland equivalents. But if you tackle th is problem from the other end, looking at how much work there is to be done, and how much labour they have, you don’t get the same answer. The Ministry of Agriculture in their Farm Management Handbook have published additional figures of the amount of work required for each farm operation on an area or livestock unit basis. If you apply these figures to all those farms you find that the amount of labour they have is virtually equal to the amount of labour re uired for the area of crops and numbers of various types of livestock. The merence in %e output per man between those farms and the lower ones can be defined much more easily in terms of yields, the yields are much lower. I would like to know if Mr. Hendry thinks that the explanation in Scotland is the same.

I am not suggesting for one minute that we should not aim at higher output per man in those areas. We must, but surely the line we must take is of finding methods, new methods, which will give us a higher ou ut per man. We are attempting to use

intensive line in these areas. It is all right to criticise but one should try to be constructive as well. Shepherding wa.s mentioned at some length and I think that is a good p o h t to start. Are the shepherding methods the best possible? In this country the number of sheep a shepherd can look after is only about a quarter of the number that can be looked after in my own country, Australia. I think the social approach comes in here. I get the impression when I am in Wales that to be a good shepherd you have got to be born one and have at least three generations of shepherds behind you. This is rather in contrast with my own country when it was being opened up for large scalesheepproduction. If you look up the early letters that were written by the squatters to the controllers of the convicts asking for convicts to settle, a large number insisted that they wanted pick- pockets for shepherds. The pick-pocket was regarded as the least intelligent of all the people that could be selected by the Government in this country as suitable convicts for Australia, and the only people who could stand the boring and unintelligent life of shepherding. I am not suggesting that shepherds should be unintelligent but I think it is worth recording that Australia started on the policy of building up a sheep industry, the biggest in the world, and managed to finance and subsidise from that sheep industry a lot of very unprofitable secondary industries.

D. Godfrcy: I should like to say how much I have appreciated Mr. Hendry‘s paper. He gave us

a lot of facts and threw out a lot of suggestions as t o how we might inte ret those facts. Quite a lot has already been said about shepherding and I really myserdoubt whether there is just such a shortage for the hirseb anywhere near, say, a school, a village or a township. The problem is very acute, of course, in the really outlying districts. where it is a job to get anyone at all to go at any price-and I don’t blame them.

The farmers in Scotland, Mr. Hendry tells us, are buying fewer tractors. Why should that be? Some of the prudent Scots present probably feel that the Scottish farmers are getting more out of their tractors and making them last longer, just as they do their suits, but the most likely reason perhaps, in addition to those Mr. Hendry suggested, is the overwhelming importance of livestock over large areas in Scotland. In the whole of the North and West livestock are all important and the amount of tractor work required for the sheep and cattle, and, to a certain extent, pigs and poultry, is considerably less than for cash cropping.

I am glad that Mr. Hendry has devoted a whole page to the question of the small stock rearing farms which are a very, very acute problem. The root of the trouble is they are so frequently too small, 50 or 60 acres of poor arable with no outrun, and that just won’t support a farmer and his family. As Mr. Hendry says, the obvious solution is pigs and poultry intensified but in those remote areas this is so often found t o be im racticable. It is interesting to note that between 1919 and 1939 a number of large 408-500 acre farms in the North of Scotland were split up by the Department of Agriculture into 50 acre units, hopelessly uneconomic. I am glad to say that since the last war such farms as have been split up have been put into 100-200 acre units, which is f a r more sensible.

I would like to end on a rather gallant note. A word should be said of the part that farmers’ wives and farm servants’ wives play in Scottish agriculture. Mr. Hendry has made some mention of them here and there. Many of the larger areas in Scotland are worked by the man and his wife-an excellent combination, In the North of Scotland, on small farms, not only does the wife of the farmer look after the hens as she does in almost all other areas, but she helps to dip the sheep, to hoe the turnips, to harvest, to thresh the corn, to lead out dung sometimes, besides looking after the home. And, of course, she usually keeps the farm accounts and does the book-keeping. I do not know how she manages to do it all, but that is often the lot of the farmer’s wife in some of the glens and it may explain why the amount of casual labour is rather smaller in Scottish agriculture.

old methods in an area which is unsuitable to 2 em; we are probably farming beyond the

Journal of Agricultural Economics. 429

E. M . H . Lloyd: I would also like to congratulate Mr. Hendry on his paper. I think we are indebted

to him for having gone into i t fairly widely. In fact he has touched on almost all the main economic problems of Scottish agriculture.

What is meant by " we rely upon our home agriculture for only about half of our food supplies " ? I know it is commonly said but I never know what it means. Do you reckon in terms of wholesale value, retail value, weight, and calories. Calories I believe is the only foundation for the saying that we only get half our food supplies from agri- culture.

Having done me the surprising honour of suggesting that I should be President next year, I have been trying to learn something about agricultural economics. One of the questions I have been spending quite a lot of time on is trying to find out how many farmers there are in agriculture in order to divide up, roughly, th is aggregate net farming income in the United Kingdom. Scotland has the best documentary evidence on this subject, as this paper bears out. The conclusion in Scotland is that there are 30,000 only who can be described as full-time farmers. The Inland Revenue publishes annual reports as to the numbers of farmers in Scotland who do not escape assessment; they show 35,000. Who are these 5,000 the Inland Revenue catch and the Department of Agriculture in Scotland does not recognise ?

Apparently the Department's definition of a farmer, or a farm, is based on labour requirements and so any farmer who has not got a holding large enough to provide a full-time employment is regarded as a part- or spare-time farmer and he may or may not have other means of livelihood. I do not want to labour the point but I suggest we want even more facts than we have a t present. We should recommend Mr. Hendry to go forward with the good work and clear up this notion of what is meant by a farmer and, i f possible. find out how many farmers have other means of livelihood and how many are engaged in hobby farming.

My next point is of tremendous importance to all concerned with trying to see what our agricultural policy is or should be. The question of the contribution, the net increment as Mr. Hendry calls it, per man, or per person. is better studied by comparing the Board of Trade figures for agriculture with the net increment per person in industry. I have seen some unpublished figures which attempt that sort of comparison and, i f I am right, the figure of net output or net value added in agriculture compared with that in manu- facturing industry for the last ten years has been surprisingly close. In some years the net output, or increment, per person in agriculture was actually higher than in industry.

I am not suggesting that these figures are accurate but for what it is worth, on the basis of such estimates that have been made over a range of years, the net output per person was comparable. If you deduct for the last two years, say, the total estimated subsidies, then the output per person in agriculture goes down to about two-thirds of that in industry. I commend that also as a subject for further study by our agricultural economists and even Mr. Hendry.

Mr. Hendry illustrates the importance of this question by saying that his conclusions, which are similar, would suggest that, from an economic point of view and under conditions of general full employment and even scarcity of employment in industry. a diminishing labour force in agriculture is in the national interest. Labour should be attracted from where i t earns least to occupations where it can earn most.

The question of stock rearing farms is of tremendous significance because I think it illustrates the social problem and to a large extent the political problem that faces England and Wales, particularly Wales, Scotland. and some say Northern Ireland, and almost every country in Europe, if not the world. Here you have small family farms with a low output per man, tenacious of their traditions. I do not know how much time extension workers and advisory officers spend going to them but I imagine they frequently get a fairly deaf ear turned to suggestions involving revolutionizing their methods. In fact the advisory service does not know what to do with them except to say that reduction of the labour force would lead to greater output per person which might open the way to amalgamation of holdings. I would suggest to Mr. Hendry that what he means is that amalgamation of holdings may be the necessary condition for a more economic use of that land and of the labour now uneconomically used on holdings that are too small. We have not given much attention to this problem in this country, certainly not in Whitehall. O.E.E.C., of course, recognises i t as a major problem in France, in Germany and in Italy. Before the war there was over-population of farms, particularly small farms, in the whole of Europe. Now, if you are to get greater efficiency and greater output per man, the problem is how do you bring about amalgamation of holdings. It would be going too far to pursue that point, but I mention it because it is brought prominently to our attention in Mr. Hendry's paper.

430 Jowmul of Agricultural Economics.

These stock rearing farms, however small they are, are in fact performing one of the things that the Government says is most needed at the present time and which the Agriculture Act lays down, and that is to encourage efficient production of what it is desirable to produce at home, which recent White Papers have explained is more beef cattle. These stock rearing farms are performing the essential service of rearing store cattle. What strikes me as an outsider looking at this picture is that there is no marketing board for store cattle, there is no guaranteed price for the small man who sells store cattle: he has to take the risks of a market and he has to sell in competition with imported Irish store cattle. Is this right, and what have the N.F.U. to say about it ? Why not a marketing board for store cattle I Well, whether or not that is practicable, and perhaps i t is not, I do suggest that in dealing with the problem of promoting expansion of our beef industry, the first thing to go for is to find out how to help the stock rearing farms.

J . Ward: I should like t o comment on one point made by the last speaker in connection with

the comparison of output per man in agriculture and the output per man in industry. From the very limited official statistics available I have made a rough calculation and find that output per man in agriculture is rather less than output per man in manufacturing industry.

E. M . H. Lloyd:

J. Ward :

equivalent in terms of differential wage rates.

E. M . H . Lloyd:

Per person engaged ?

Per person engaged, even if I actually adjust i t to try and make some form of man

Were you only referring to the wage earner, or did you include the employer ?

J . Ward: Wage earners and salaried people. The output per man on this basis was rather

less in agriculture than in industry. But if you do this exercise in terms of per LlOO of labour, using labour in the same ddnition, then the figures are rather different and agriculture comes out slightly better than industry.

Dr. Margrrret Wright: I think it would be helpful in assessing whether or not the farmer can pay his dairyman

or other expert worker a much higher wage, to be able to make a comparison between the farmer's earnings on the average and the hired man's earnings on the average. I am not an agricultural economist and I have not got figures up t o date, but I do know that in 1932, if you take the average figures all over the country, the earnings of the farmer were something of the order of 3) to 4 times the earnings of the hired worker. The hired worker had to pay only the costs of his family, his cottage being very often secured to him with other advantages, whereas the farmer had to pay his men, had to remunerate himself and his wife, had to cover all the costs of his own family. In addition he had t o pay for things like fertilisers, equipment and rent and every- thing else that the farm needs. I don't think we ought to criticise the farmer for not paying enough until we have got a clearer idea whether or not he can afford to pay it.

There is constant talk of the drift from the land. In every country where engineering and other consumer goods are wanted for export it is the custom for the number of agricultural workers to fall. I think the loss of workers may be attributed partly to the young men seeing other ways of life when they are doing military service and 90 on. I also think it is due to the cheapness of motor cycles and the fact that the energetic and ambitious young man with ideas gets a motor bicycle, gets about and he marries a town girl. The town girl is not going to put up with acres of mud and miles of distance and one bus in two hours or something of that sort. She wants facilities and she wants a better cottage. The farmer, I suggest, hasn't got all that money to pay his expenses and also to bear the capital costs of bringing cottages up to the condition the young town girl expects. '

There are provisions for assistance for capital expenditure on farm c o k e s but they have one fatal fault. They are.optional for local authorities who, if they do not like this system, do not have to give the assistance. I think one would kdconsiderable difference in the reconditioning of farm cottages in areas where these grants are available to landowners and where they are not. Has anybody made an assessment of how much

Journal of Agricultural Economics. 43 1

i t is going to cost in capital to recondition the cottages that are needed to house these workers, and whether or not the country can afford it ?

J. A. Gilchrist: As one of those working in Scotland near Mr. Hendry I would like to thank him

for what he has done for us. While he was speaking my mind was filling in the human side of the picture. I think it could be summed up very well in Scotland not so long ago when we had what we called the " feeing " or the hiring days. There was a little drama enacted in the stable at the term day or just before. The farmer went in and he said, ' I Well, Jock, are you sf;"y,iig ? " '' Aye," said Jock, and the w;rk went on. Or I ' Well, Jock, are you staying ? and Jock left. Today I am told it is, '' Jock, will you stay ? " I am pleased at that recognition of the tremendous rise in the farm workers' status.

Has Mr. Hendry any idea how much regional mobility there is ? I would like to know whether the farm worker in the good areas is being recruited locally or from the outlying areas. Fifteen years ago I would have said that as the Scots farm worker became scarcer we would go more and more for the Irish. Today I am rather doubtful about that with the rising amount of skill required.

One point upon which I might disagree with Mr. Hendry is where he deals with the regional changes in numbers. I wonder if the explanation of the changes is not due primarily to the mobility in farming type, partly a change from arable to dairying, partly increased tomato growing and partly the early potato. Perhaps we may have a chance of finding that out.

G. F. Hendry: I doubt whether I can deal individually with all the points that have been raised

but I will try. May I first of all dispose of three purely factual points which Mr. Wynne raised on machinery: The figure given in the paper for machinery includes depreciation and repairs but does not include new purchases. If you included that, i t might be as well to include electricity also as an input and the figure would be about &19+ million. Machinery in Table 16 is the opening valuation, and the constant prices in Table 14 are for 1 9 4 5 - 4 6 i t is a very conventional gross output index.

I do feel, looking at this paper now and having had the opportunity before speaking to talk again to Dr. Duncan on this subject, that what we have been doing in Scotland in the Department (and what I have been doing in this paper) is largely to document what Dr. Duncan has been saying for the last two decades. We have been supplying the facts and figures to back up his opinions. I certainly agree with his statement that it is not a matter of wages only, a point also brought out by Dr. Wright. It is a social problem, this problem of retaining workers, particularly where the situation is remote. I want also to deal with one other point which was brought up by Dr. Wright, which relates to the question of shepherds' earnings. Perhaps it may be that the non-material incentive of a much better house is much more important to the shepherd than a higher cash wage, and, as we know, the better house is not adequately reflected in the Wages Board rates.

Specialists' rates have been mentioned, and I do think that the speaker (I think it was Mr. Wynne) who suggested that specialist rates in Scotland had not been to the advantage of the worker, was wrong-and for this reason. The figures which I have put in the paper suggest that the average return to a worker in Scotland is higher than in England and my opinion is that this is because there is a higher proportion of specialists. Had there not been the specialist rates I don't believe there would have been the higher proportion of specialists. This may seem a long chain, but it is, I think, linked up with the way in which the wages structure in Scotland has been evolved. It has not been evolved from the centre outwards but from the perimeter inwards, because the Scottish wages structure was based on eleven wages districts and when wage regulation first began it was very much organised by the district committees. The district committees were the fashioners of the wages structure, the central Wages Board acting as co-ordinator. I think Dr. Duncan will agree with this, and he can speak from personal experience of the Wages Board. Gradually the emphasis has shifted towards the central Wages Board and away from district committees. The reason I make this point is that I do not think that if you try to impose a completely new specialist structure, say in England and Wales, you will necessarily get the same results as you got in Scotland. The whole thing about the Scottish wages structure is that it has evolved as part of the tradition of agricultural labour in Scotland.

The question of the additional hours worked by these specialist workers came up as did the question of how much a good dairyman might get. Well, the average dairyman gets (or got in 1953-54) about 15s. a week more than the average stockman, and about

No, the wife wants a better house,

432 Journal of Agricultural Economics.

30s. a week more than the average general worker, and I do not think there is any doubt that the good dairyman was getting at least 510 a week-and probably about Dr. Duncan’s A12 a week. I am quite sure that if we looked through our files we should be able to produce quite a number of cases in that range of 510 to L12 a week.

Now I think I may leave the question of earnings figures and say something about stock rearing farms. I do want to say in connection with Mr. Davidson’s comment that I don’t think the point that he put really controverts my suggestion that this is a question largely of scale. The stock rearing farm does seem to me to fall down when it comes to scale. The work may be there but it is quite natural that the work could be much better organised, and more economically and efficiently performed. were the scale larger.

This links up with what Mr. Lloyd said to us about amalgamation. That is such a thorny subject that I was not prepared (and am still not prepared) to commit myself any further than I have done in the paper. Mr. Lloyd, and also Mr. Ward, mentioned the question of comparisons between agriculture and industry. I think Mr. Wardmade a very interesting point when he told us that although output per man equivalent was probably lower in agriculture than in industry, output per LlOO expenditure on labour was higher. That has a bearing both on the earning capacity of agricultural workers and on their output capacity. An interesting point arises here. The figure of 5548 as the output per man for all industries in Scotland is quoted in the paper. As a Scotsman i t grieves me to have to admit that the figure for Scotland for all industries is below the figure for the United Kingdom, and as an agricultural economist from Scotland it grieves me even more to have to admit that the output per man in agriculture in Scotland is also very probably below the U.K. level. I base that upon some figures published recently in the Westminster Bank Review in an article by Mr. Healey of Oxford. He there has given a figure of A597 per annum as the 1954-55 output per person employed for U.K. agriculture. I a m fairly confident, from the Scottish figures that I have looked at, and getting as near as I can to Healey’s definitions. that our output per person employed would be below that by quite a few pounds.

I put the observations on mechanisation in the paper to draw attention to the fact that I thought that future gains in labour productivity would be more hardly won than past gains and also t o suggest that th is might link up with what has been said a t this Conference in the last two days on the farm management side. I think that what these figures on mechanisation should suggest to us is that future progress depends much more on organisation and much less on horse power. Certainly that is the case for Scotland.

I am afraid we cannot throw any light on the question of regional changes which Mr. Gilchrist raised. And much as we feel we should have done something on regional comparisons of earnings in Scotland as Dr. Duncan suggested, I am afraid we haven’t yet tackled i t but it is one of the things that today’s discussions may prompt us to do.