AGRICULTURAL QUESTIONS

BY RT.  HON.  F.D.  ACLAND

P.C.; M.P. (L.) North-West Cornwall; Financial Secretary, War Office, 1908-10; Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1911-15; Financial Secretary to Treasury, Feb.-June, 1915; Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, 1915-16; a Forestry Commissioner.  Chairman of the Agricultural Organisation Society.

Mr. Acland said:—­I begin by laying down in a didactic form five points which one would like to see firmly established in our rural life:  (i) intensive production; (ii) plenty of employment at good wages; (iii) easy access to land, and a good chance of rising upon the land; (iv) real independence in rural life; (v) co-operative association for many purposes.

Intensive production is most important.  It is so easy to say the farmer can get more out of the land, and the farmer should get more out of the land, that we are tempted to continue and say that the farmer must be made to get more out of the land.  But it isn’t so easy.  It has been tried and failed, and when any subject in our British political life has been brought up to the boiling-point, and yet nothing effective has been done, it is extremely difficult to bring it to the boil a second time.

It is worth while tracing out what has actually happened.  The Government’s Agriculture Act of 1921 contained four great principles:—­(i) that we must have more food produced in this country (a) as an insurance against risk of war, (b) so as to meet our post-war conditions as a debtor nation by importing less of our food supplies; (ii) that as the most productive farming is arable farming, and as by maintaining a proper proportion of arable we can on emergency make ourselves independent for our food supplies for an indefinite time, farmers should be guaranteed against loss on their arable rotations; (iii) that if farmers are to be required to produce more they must have clear legal rights to farm their land in the most productive way, a greater compensation for disturbance; (iv) that as the first three principles give security to the nation and to the farmer, it is desirable also to give security to the worker by permanently continuing the war-time system of Agricultural Wages Boards.

These principles were duly embodied in the Bill as it left the House of Commons:—­

(i) The Ministry of Agriculture, acting through the County Agricultural Committees, was given powers to insist on a certain standard of arable cultivation, as well as in minor matters, such as control of weeds and of rabbits;

(ii) The difference between the ascertained market price and the estimated cost of production on his wheat and oat acreage was guaranteed to the farmer, the guarantee not to be altered except after four years’ notice;

(iii) The landlord had to forfeit a year’s rent if a tenant was disturbed except for bad farming, or four years’ rent if the disturbance was capricious;