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Questioning Leadership
- Michael Harvey
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- June 2024
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- 31 July 2024
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This Element posits that questions are the heart of leadership. Leaders ask hard questions that spark creative solutions and new understandings. Asking by itself isn't enough - leaders must also help find answers and turn them into effective action. But the leader's work begins with questions. This Element surveys the main traditions of leadership thought; considers the nature of the group and its questions; explores how culture and bureaucracy serve to provide stable answers to the group's questions; and explores how leaders offers disruptive answers, especially in times of change and crisis. It uses the lens of questions to consider two parallel American lives, President Abraham Lincoln and General Robert E. Lee.
341 An intracranial EEG map of naturalistic images in the human brain
- Harvey Huang, Gabriela Ojeda Valencia, Michael Jensen, Nicholas M. Gregg, Benjamin H. Brinkmann, Brian N. Lundstrom, Kai J. Miller, Gregory A. Worrell, Dora Hermes
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- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science / Volume 6 / Issue s1 / April 2022
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- 19 April 2022, p. 63
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OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Our overall goal is to identify the processes used by the human visual system to encode visual stimuli into perceptual representations. In this project, our objective is (i) to collect a dataset of human neural activity in response to 1000 naturalistic color images and (ii) to determine how image parameters drive different parts of the human brain. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We recorded iEEG data in 4 human subjects who had been implanted for epilepsy monitoring. Each subject was presented 10 sets of 100 naturalistic stimuli, taken from the Natural Scenes Dataset (Allen et al., 2021), on a screen for 1 second each with 1 second rest intervals between stimuli. The subjects were instructed to fixate on a red dot at the center of the screen and were prompted to recall whether they had seen 3 additional test stimuli at the end of each set to encourage attentiveness. We calculated significant neural responses at each electrode by comparing evoked potentials and high frequency power changes during each stimulus vs. rest. Electrodes with significant responses were then mapped to anatomic locations in each subjects brain and then collectively to a standard brain. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: The natural image set elicited significant evoked potentials and high frequency responses at electrodes in each subject. Response latencies, from 80 to 300 ms after stimulus onset, portrayed the evolution of visual processing along the visual pathways, through key sites such as the early visual cortex, ventral temporal cortex, intraparietal sulcus, and frontal eye field. These responses differed significantly from those elicited by simple patterns, which drove early visual cortex but less so in later regions. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: These data show that the human brain responds differently to more complex images. Determining the human brains response to naturalistic images is essential for encoding models that describe the processing in the human visual system. These models may further future efforts for electrical neurostimulation therapies such as for restoring vision.
Preface and Acknowledgements
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp ix-x
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Summary
The intellectual origins of this book are explained in chapter 1, but, as with many books, there is a parallel story about its conception. It began in 2007, when three of the authors (MW, ML and PB) examined the Farm Management Survey archive at Exeter and rapidly concluded that it was potentially of great historical value. Since we had all been interested, from different perspectives, in the changes that had been occurring in agriculture throughout our working lives, it is tempting to speculate on whether we would ever have co-operated on researching the topic together in the absence of the archive; what we know, however, is that the potential threat to its existence, brought about by the relocation of the Centre for Rural Policy Research from one Exeter University building to another, precipitated a joint decision to explore the archive further. We obtained a British Academy grant in 2007–8 to employ a research assistant, Dr Helen Blackman, who catalogued its contents. The following year, together with another colleague (DH), we obtained an ESRC grant to fund work on the field books, looking specifically at the evidence for technical change and the explanatory variables associated with it. The grant enabled one of us (PB) to devote most of his time to the project and also to employ Dr Allan Butler as a research fellow.
It is this decision to concentrate on what the archive, together with other sources, can reveal about technical change in agriculture that determines the range of dates in the title of the book. As we explain in the text, the period between the late 1930s and 1985 was one in which UK agricultural policy more or less consistently promoted increasing output. Before and after those dates, the policy message was less clear, so additional variables played a part in farmers’ decision-making on investment and the adoption of new technology. There is an interesting book to be written about changes in UK agriculture after 1985, but it is not this book.
Inevitably, we have accumulated numerous debts of gratitude in the course of our research and writing. Without Helen Blackman’s rapid and efficient cataloguing work, we would not have been successful in obtaining the ESRC grant, and she later went on, with Katie Garvey, to help with the analysis of the field books.
9 - The Declining Enterprises: Pigs and Poultry
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 216-243
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This chapter is about both pigs and poultry. From a twenty-first-century perspective, it may not make much sense to write about two separate industries in the same chapter, but until about the 1970s they were often bracketed together. The second edition of Dexter and Barber’s classic book on farm management put them into the same chapter but also caught the end of the era:
Both pigs and poultry are moving into the hands of specialist producers. A few hundred poultry kept on the general farm is becoming a thing of the past … in general, large-scale units are necessary to make use of the technical know-how required for successful egg production. Pig production has not yet become so specialised. Pigs are still found as a subsidiary enterprise on many farms, and there are few, if any, of the enormous empires commonly associated with commercial egg and poultry production.
What brought them together in the first place was that they could both be kept on small areas of land and be fed either on the by-products of the farm or on purchased feeds. They were also often the first casualties of specialisation in the 1960s and ‘70s. As mixed farms began to specialise in grassland or arable enterprises, pigs and poultry were found to require more labour and capital than they warranted. As pig and poultry producers specialised, they were able to produce at prices that left little profit for mixed farms. What follows in this chapter is a more detailed account of the evolution of these two intensive livestock enterprises in the United Kingdom in general and south-west England in particular since the beginning of the Second World War.
Pig Keeping in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s
There were 4.4 million pigs in the UK in 1939, supplying 82 per cent of the nation’s pork consumption but only 37 per cent of its bacon and ham. The latter dominated the imported pigmeat market, with most imported supplies originating in Denmark and the Netherlands, and the UK was the major world importer of pigmeat. By 1947, the pig population had declined to 1.6 million, pork had virtually disappeared from the market, and bacon production had more than halved.
Figures and Tables
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 17 September 2021, pp vii-viii
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Abbreviations
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 17 September 2021, pp xi-xii
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The Real Agricultural Revolution
- The Transformation of English Farming, 1939-1985
- Paul Brassley, Michael Winter, Matt Lobley, David Harvey
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- 17 September 2021
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At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 British agriculture was largely powered by the muscles of men, women, and horses, and used mostly nineteenth-century technology to produce less than half of the country's temperate food. By 1985, less land and far fewer people were involved in farming, the power sources and technologies had been completely transformed, and the output of the country's agriculture had more than doubled. This is the story of the national farm, reflecting the efforts and experiences of 200,000 or so farmers and their families, together with the people they employed. But it is not the story of any individual one of them. We know too little about change at the individual farm level, although what happened varied considerably between farms and between different technologies.
Based on an improbably-surviving archive of Farm Management Survey accounts, supported by oral histories from some of the farmers involved, this book explores the links between the production of new technologies, their transmission through knowledge networks, and their reception on individual farms. It contests the idea that rapid adoption of technology was inevitable, and reveals the unevenness, variability and complexity that lay beneath the smooth surface of the official statistics.
8 - Specialisation and Expansion
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 199-215
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Summary
In the 1940s and ‘50s, many English farms were small, although not as small as those of continental Europe (even in 1970, the average farm size in the six original members of the European Union was only 31.4 acres). Cornish farms were especially small; the National Farm Survey of 1941–2 revealed that 82 per cent of them were of less than one hundred acres, compared with 71 per cent in Devon and 64 per cent in Dorset. Over the following three decades, they grew in size, and whereas the average size of a holding in England and Wales in 1944 was 81.7 acres, by 1983 it was 155.3 acres. The size of an average dairy herd grew to an even greater extent, from fifteen cows in 1942 to sixty-seven cows in 1985, as table 5.1 reveals, so it logically follows that farms that remained as milk producers must have specialised and dispensed with some enterprises in order to concentrate on dairy farming. This, as we shall see, resulted in the more effective use of capital equipment and made it easier for farmers and their workers to keep up to date with changing technologies, and to some extent resulted from the desire to achieve these desirable outcomes. This chapter examines these changes in farm size and the process of specialisation.
Farm Size Changes
As table 8.1 shows, the decrease in the number of holdings over time was not evenly spread over the various different farm size groups. It was the smaller farms that tended to go, while the number of farms with more than one hundred acres increased. This applied to the structure of farming in the three south-western counties as much as to the national picture. By 1974, Cornwall still had more than the national average number of farms of less than one hundred acres, but the number of sub-fifty-acre farms had decreased considerably since 1950. In Devon and Dorset, where there were fewer sub-fifty-acre farms, but more fifty- to one hundred-acre farms than the national average in 1950, it was the smaller farms that disappeared and those with more than 100 acres that grew in number.
Index
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 17 September 2021, pp 283-288
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5 - Dairy Farming
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 111-162
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Summary
The previous chapters, dealing with research and development, education and advice, and agricultural policy, have been concerned with the context within which technical change took place in the agricultural industry in the UK. They have demonstrated that, at a national level, there was a more or less consistent policy over the fifty years between the mid-1930s and the mid-1980s to increase agricultural output, and that after about 1950 this was accompanied by a desire also to increase efficiency. Both of these objectives were supported by considerable investment, on the part of both the state and the ancillary industries, especially the feed, fertiliser, pesticide, and agricultural machinery industries, in research, development, education, and advice to farmers. The following chapters are concerned with the impact of these policies and investments. They deal with the impact of technical change at both the national and the farm level and examine in particular the processes involved in adopting new technologies.
If, as we argued in chapter 1, the adoption of technology is contingent upon individual circumstances, it follows that these need to be followed up in greater detail. Each of the following chapters will therefore begin by examining the national picture, then go on to narrow the focus to the three south-western counties of England for which we have more detailed data, and finally examine the experience of individual farmers. We begin by examining technical change in dairy farming. The reason for this is not only that it was a major farming type in the south-west, but also because it was the farm type upon which the south-western FMS, from which our individual farm data is drawn, concentrated its efforts. From this study of dairying, we shall see that changes in breeding, feeding, and housing were significant. More generally, and applying not only to dairying but also to farming in general, there were also changes in capital and land, labour and machinery, specialisation and expansion, and in the fact that some enterprises declined, and each of these aspects will be the subject of succeeding chapters.
Developments in Dairy Farming
From the late 1930s to the 1980s, dairy farming was one of the most important single enterprises in UK farming, always accounting for at least 20 per cent of total output, and sometimes over 25 per cent.
3 - Knowledge Networks in UK Farming, 1935–85
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 46-87
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The previous chapter identified the principal developments in the administration and funding of agricultural science and the resultant activities of agricultural scientists. This chapter explores the links between research and the agricultural industry and considers the changes in agricultural education, extension, or advice, and other means, principally various forms of media, by which farmers became aware of technical developments. It then examines the varying experiences of individual farmers and their reactions to the knowledge available to them, before finally drawing conclusions from both this chapter and chapter 2 on the impact of research and its value to the farming industry.
The Agricultural Improvement Councils and Their Successors
Many agricultural scientists and university academics had close informal links with farmers through discussion groups, meetings, and the occasional necessity to carry out research or survey work on farms, but there were also official bodies designed to foster links between scientific research and practical agriculture. In 1941, the ARC was given the same status as the Medical Research Council and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which meant that its role changed from an advisory one to a duty to undertake such research as it thought fit with the resources placed at its disposal. At the same time, two AICs, one for England and Wales and one for Scotland, were established. Sir Donald Fergusson, Chairman of the England and Wales AIC, identified the different roles to be played in a letter to Sir Thomas Middleton, then Chairman of the ARC: ‘The ARC will concentrate their energies on strengthening the efficiency of the research organisation, but will not be concerned to get the results applied in practice. This will be the job of the AICs.’ Their functions were further defined in the 1942 report on agricultural research in Great Britain as keeping in touch with scientific research, advising on testing promising results for incorporation into farming practice, and expediting this process, and also advising on farming problems in need of attention from researchers. At this point in the war, there was also a Technical Development Committee, which had sub-committees in the counties, and which had apparently been established initially to solve urgent wartime problems.
Contents
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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10 - Conclusions
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 244-263
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Summary
The first four chapters of this book demonstrate that new technologies became available between the mid-1930s and the mid-1980s and that their production and adoption were encouraged by government policy; the remaining chapters explain why their adoption took time. Before attempting to draw more general conclusions, it is worth summarising the story as told so far.
Summarising Agricultural Change 1939–85
Chapter 2 examined research and development in agriculture. Much of this was funded directly by government through the ARC or indirectly by its support for university-based researchers. As this chapter demonstrates, the funding was not given uncritically or unthinkingly. Throughout these fifty years, to a greater or lesser extent, government ministers and civil servants, as well as others outside the direct policy-forming network, questioned the amount of money going into agricultural research and the purposes to which it was put. Despite this questioning, funding for agricultural research was maintained, at least into the 1970s. The kind of research that was funded was constantly under tension. In general, scientists argued that it was best to carry out fundamental research to explain how plants and animals worked, at a molecular or cellular level if necessary. Knowledge of this sort, they felt, could then be applied to practical problems. Research funders and farmers, on the other hand, were often more interested in finding immediate answers to current problems. It was not a dilemma that was confined to this period or this country. As Jonathan Harwood has pointed out, academics in German agricultural colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often felt that the way to increase their professional standing was to engage in more academic research at the expense of an immediately practical focus. Nevertheless, the scientists could certainly cite several examples of fundamental research being transmuted with reasonable rapidity into practical application. The work on the biochemistry and physiology of ruminant digestion carried out at the Hannah Dairy Research Institute and the Rowett Research Institute in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, led to a reformulation of feeding standards for cattle and sheep by the late 1960s. Studies of spermatogenesis at Cambridge led not only to improved methods of artificial insemination in cattle but also to the application of AI to pigs, and ultimately to work on embryo transfer, cloning of animals, and in vitro fertilisation for humans.
2 - The Organisation of Agricultural Science, 1935–85
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 24-45
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If the state requires an agricultural industry that produces more, and produces it more efficiently, and expects those output and efficiency gains to arise largely from scientific and technical changes, it should presumably, in a perfect world, invest in science to produce new technology and then ensure that farmers and their workers acquire familiarity with that new technology. This chapter is therefore concerned with investments in agricultural science, by both the state, on which there is much information, and by private firms, on which there is much less. It does not attempt to outline the work of agricultural scientists, their discoveries, and developments, or the resultant changes in technologies and practices in this period. There are two reasons for this: first, to do so would require another book of at least the length of the present one; secondly, two agricultural scientists, Sir Kenneth Blaxter and Noel Robertson, published almost exactly that book in 1995. What they did not do was to explain at any length why governments chose to fund agricultural research, or how they administered it, or how its results were supposed to be passed on to farmers. This chapter concentrates on the first two of these questions, and the following chapter attempts to trace the problems encountered in moving from science to practice. As a shorthand term for this process, we shall refer to it as a knowledge network. Since the science and its onward transmission in knowledge networks are intimately linked, it is appropriate to begin with a brief survey of the literature that is relevant to both chapters.
There are numerous theoretical approaches to the analysis of knowledge networks, in which we include here the analysis of technical innovation, diffusion, and adoption, although it could be argued that a knowledge network is simply one part of that larger process. A crude division would be between economic and sociological models, and it is crude because many of the models analyse both economic and sociological variables, although some privilege an economic methodology while others write from a sociological perspective. Thus Hayami and Ruttan with their induced innovation concept (essentially, that technical change is a response to factor price changes) would be among the more obviously economic in approach, although they emphasise the importance of land tenure and other rural institutions.
7 - Labour and Machinery
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 183-198
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Labour
In 1939, 4.6 per cent of the working population of Great Britain was engaged in agriculture; by 1975, only 1.65 per cent (of a larger workforce) were still in farming. No account of technical change in agriculture can omit some mention of agricultural labour, for while increased use of capital was the cause of some technical changes, decreasing use of labour was, at least in part, a result of technical change and a cause of increasing labour productivity.
By 1939, the decline in the agricultural labour force from the peak that it had reached in 1851 was a well-established trend. It had especially affected the employed sector, those other than the farmers and their families. A contemporary analysis of the position mentioned the search for better wages and housing conditions among the reasons for ‘the rural exodus’, and a consequent shortage in both the traditional and new (mechanical) skills needed in farming, together with potential changes in the vitality of village life. Ironically, this was written just as the farm labour force was about to rise for the first time in eighty years in response to the wartime increase in the demand for home-produced food. For today’s reader, accustomed to seeing cereals harvested by combine harvester and hearing of automatic milking machines, it is worth remembering how much hand work, from stooking sheaves to milking, was needed during the war. Extra output needed extra labour. The regular labour force increased hardly at all between 1939 and 1944 (by less than 1 per cent), but it was assisted by far more casual workers, members of the Women’s Land Army, and eventually prisoners of war, so that the total labour force rose by more than 20 per cent by 1944, although it was not evenly distributed. In 1941, the data from the National Farm Survey found that 44 per cent of holdings in England and Wales had no regular labour apart from the farmer and his or her spouse. Numbers of hired workers rose still further with the post-war growth in output, and still included German prisoners of war until 1947.
4 - Agricultural Policy, 1939–85
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 04 January 2024
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- 17 September 2021, pp 88-110
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The business environment within which farmers made decisions about whether or not to adopt new technologies was at least influenced, if not determined, by government agricultural policy, so any account of technical change should pay attention to policy developments. Income and price support measures, grants, and subsidies, as well as the provision of advice and ministerial encouragement, could all encourage farmers to invest and produce more; and at the end of this period the imposition of quotas and changes in support regimes provided signals to restrict production. These agricultural policies were formulated within historical, political, and economic contexts, which should therefore at least be outlined in charting their evolution. Consequently, this chapter examines the major changes in agricultural policy and attempts to put them in context. It distinguishes between policies aimed at influencing the payments received by farmers for their products, and other policies, but does not attempt, for reasons that will become obvious, to produce a detailed and comprehensive account of agricultural policy changes between 1939 and 1985.
The Pre-War Policy Context
Government policies affecting agriculture can be traced back as least as far as regulations affecting the wool trade in the medieval period. From the later seventeenth century, export bounties and import duties regulated international trade in cereals, and by 1750 there were numerous measures to encourage the cultivation of alternative crops such as hemp, flax, and madder, to promote land drainage, regulate enclosure, tithes, and markets, control animal disease, especially cattle plague, and prevent the import of Irish cattle. In 1846, the regulations on cereal imports and exports – the Corn Laws – were repealed, and at the same time a wide range of duties on other food imports, such as dairy products, fruit, vegetables, and sugar, were also discontinued. At first sight, therefore, apart from a few years during and after the First World War, there was no agricultural policy between 1846 and the early 1930s. This is a misconception. Although there may have been no direct intervention in market prices, there were measures to protect animal health that led to intervention in agricultural trade from the 1870s onwards, to protect farmers from adulteration of fertilisers and feedingstuffs, and to promote smallholdings and rural industries as a means of retaining labour on the land.
Frontmatter
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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1 - Introduction: Exploring Agricultural Change
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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Summary
I always found when I was young that the most obscure period of time was that which was too old to be news and too young to be history – the day before yesterday, as it were.
What If …
If, by some miracle, a farmer’s son, killed at Waterloo in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, had been resurrected and sent to work on a small farm in September 1939, just in time for the Second World War, he would have known what to do. The horses and their harness would have been familiar to him, and the plough that they pulled, although perhaps a little lighter and stronger than those with which he had been brought up, was essentially the same. He would have known how to stack sheaves of corn on a wagon, and how to make them into a rick in the farmyard before they were thrashed. If he had no personal experience of them, he would at least have heard about seed drills and machines that thrashed out the corn, and milking the cows by hand would be a familiar task.
But if he had been resurrected in time to take part in the Falklands War, in 1982, he would have been completely baffled. Where were the horses? How were the cows milked by some strange device attached to their udders? And how could they possibly produce so much milk? Why were there no pigs or chickens or geese wandering around the farmyard? No ricks of corn waiting to be thrashed? What were those noisy, smelly, metal things that appeared to move on their own, without any horses to pull them? And where was everybody? How could those enormous cereal crops that he could see in the fields be harvested when hardly anybody appeared to work on the farm?
Agricultural Change 1939–85
The second half of the twentieth century saw almost unimaginable change in English agriculture. By the middle of the 1980s, an acre of land could produce three times as much wheat as it had fifty years earlier, and a cow twice as much milk, with only one-fifth of the workforce that had been in the industry at the beginning of the Second World War. Machinery and chemicals now did much of the work, and agriculture was now highly technical, rather than the repository of comfortable tradition.
6 - Land and Capital
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- The Real Agricultural Revolution
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- 17 September 2021, pp 163-182
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Capital and Land Tenure
As we saw at the end of the last chapter, technical changes often, if not inevitably, needed capital investment of some kind to be put into effect. It is easier to understand why and how changes occurred in this respect between 1939 and 1985 if we remember that capital in agriculture is conventionally divided into several categories, each of which may be provided from different sources.
Capital investment is required on a farm to make the land productive. Some capital items, such as field boundaries and drains, may have been in existence for many years; short-term capital may be needed to pay for storing finished crops until they can be sold. The conventional division is between landlord’s capital and tenant’s capital. The former consists of the land itself and the buildings, hedges, and fences, roads, drains, and so on upon it, all of which are for all practical purposes inseparable from the land, and the money invested in these items is not available for running the farm business. However, since they are so immobile, such items provide good security against which money can be borrowed. They are usually referred to as landlord’s capital, since they are normally provided by the landlord on a tenanted farm. More capital is needed to acquire the machinery and breeding livestock, and it too has to be invested for several years and is not available for day-to-day purposes, so like the landlord’s capital it forms part of the fixed capital of the farm. However, since on a tenanted farm it is normally provided by the tenant, it forms part of the tenant’s capital. The other part of the tenant’s capital is the working capital, which is turned over more rapidly. It is used to pay for the necessary labour and feedingstuffs that must be bought before fattening animals can be sold, or the seeds and fertilisers purchased in the spring before a cereal crop is sold in the autumn. Some writers therefore distinguished between long-term and short-term capital and argued that different sources should be used for each type; in other words, that it would be unwise to use a bank loan that can be recalled at any time to finance land purchase.
Bibliography
- Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, Michael Winter, University of Exeter, Matt Lobley, University of Exeter, David Harvey, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark and University of Exeter
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- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 04 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 17 September 2021, pp 264-282
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