The British Food Production Front
by SIR WILLIAM GAVIN
1
IN PEACE or war the life-line of Britain is her shipping. An exhibit at the World’s Fair in 1939 showed this with dramatic force—ant-like processions of ships traversing the seven seas and converging on British ports. They carried to us in food and animal feed 23 million tons — 15 million tons of food and 8 million of animal feed, these two items alone valued at some two billion dollars.
In 1917, with short-range submarines and little destructive air power, Germany brought us to within a few weeks of starvation. No wonder that in 1939 the sinking of our ships, the crippling of our harbors, and the destruction of port warehouses, silos, and cold stores were in the forefront of their war plans. No wonder that, after years of building up both submarines and bomber strength, they dared to hope for speedy victory.
Such aims were of course obvious to those responsible for British defense plans, and among the arrangements to come into force, if and when war occurred, was a skeleton organization to increase home food production and so to reduce our dependence on overseas shipping.
Six persons were selected in each of the counties in England and Wales (with which part of the British Isles this article mainly deals). These persons were asked by the Minister of Agriculture if, in the event of war, they would act as his responsible agents in their county. Five of them — three practical farmers, landowners, or land agents, one woman, and one representative of farm workers — were to act as unpaid members of a War Agricultural Executive Committee; the sixth was to be a paid full-time Executive Officer. Although these members-designate were not elected, but nominated personally by the Minister, in the light of his Department’s local knowledge, there was still full democratic control inasmuch as the Minister remained responsible to Parliament for all their actions.
Within a few minutes of the outbreak of war, telegrams of appointment had gone to the nearly four hundred persons concerned and in a few days all Committees had met. Little did they realize in those first hours the magnitude of the duties and of the difficulties they were shouldering, or indeed the achievements which stand to their credit.
The Committees’ first task was to form their own organizations, for the basis of operations was to be local — local planning, supervision, and authority in the hands of practical farmers within the framework of central guidance from London on broad policy. Committees were instructed to divide their counties into districts of suitable size and to appoint in each a District Committee directly responsible to them and not to Headquarters. Subcommittees were also appointed to deal with specific sections of the work, such as labor, machinery, feeding stuffs and fertilizers, drainage, horticulture, and other matters. Wide powers were given to County Committees, to be exercised by them alone and not by the District Committees and the Subcommittees.
These powers authorized Committees to give directions as to the cultivation and management of agricultural land, park land, or land used for sport and recreation. It enabled them, with the Minister’s express consent, to take over the land of a farmer who had failed to comply with the direction he received or who was not cultivating his holding according to the rules of good husbandry.
Not since feudal days have the occupiers of land in this country been forced to accept such authority over their operations, and indeed over their lives and their homes; for unlike the factory owner forced by war conditions to give up his business, the occupier of land usually has to give up his home together with his land. It. speaks volumes, therefore, for the justice and moderation of the Committees as well as for the loyalty of the farmers that, speaking generally, there was remarkably little friction and no proved case of injustice, self-interest, or personal bias.
Grumbling there was, of course, in fair measure. The British farmer, not without justification, has long exercised this right; but even this rapidly died down as the seriousness of the position came to be realized and the reasons underlying the tasks asked of them came to be understood by the farmers.
The first prime task was the plowing up of permanent grassland in order to increase the acreage of tillage for direct human food crops, but it may be of interest to add here some of the directions in which these powers came to be exercised: —
1. Growing of specific acreages of wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, and other crops which the nation required.
2. Application of fertilizers.
3. Thatching of ricks.
4. Cutting of overgrown hedges or trees which interfered with cropping.
5. Clearing land of bushes.
6. Better management of livestock.
7. Destruction of pests and game.
It must be emphasized that although Committees had power to enforce all these things, the overwhelming majority of farmers voluntarily fulfilled the tasks laid upon them without compulsion and in good will and full coöperation with Committees.
2
DURING the first nine months of the war there was little fighting in France or in the air, but there was intense activity on the land. The Government demanded the plowing up of one and one-half million acres of grassland and this was done, with a few thousand acres to spare, in spite of the longest winter frost for a century. A good beginning was also made in turning over to vegetables the flower gardening knowledge and enthusiasm of millions of small householders. A brilliant slogan, “Dig for Victory,” appeared on all the hoardings of the country.
Then came the spring disasters of 1940, when it seemed that every week a fresh country was overrun. With the fall of France the whole edifice of Allied strategy collapsed and Britain was left alone in Europe to fight it out with an Axis that dominated the Continent and threatened those sea routes which alone connected Britain with the other parts of the Empire, then her only partners in the war.
This collapse cut Britain off from many of her sources of supplies of food and food-producing materials. We had always drawn butter, eggs, and bacon from Denmark and Holland, vegetables and fruit from France and the Mediterranean countries. It is not so well known that we relied upon the Continent for many seeds, and upon North Africa for essential phosphates. Through the Mediterranean also ran the main oil-tanker route from Haifa and the Persian Gulf.
The strain this situation put on our shipping resources was immense. Ships to the Near and Far East had to be diverted round the Cape of Good Hope, quadrupling the time taken and dividing by four the yearly carrying capacity of a ship. Worst of all was the easy access to the Atlantic of U-boats based on the west coast of France. As the war went on, their activity imposed a greater and greater strain on shipping and brought back the deadly peril of starvation in an even more acute form than in 1917.
In those days it was obvious that the food resources of the country could last only a few months, and during the course of the summer these were diminished as the blitz destroyed the London Docks, as burning butter ran down the streets of Southampton and meat rotted in the bombed cold stores of Liverpool and Cardiff. The policy of increased home food production — in September, 1939, a precaution — now became the vital prop of national survival. So the whole scale and the intensity of the campaign were increased. Every farmer and every gardener realized that the country expected him to grow the largest possible quantity of human food and to allow nothing to stand in the way.
From that day to this there has been no letup in the drive to bring into good cultivation every possible acre suffering from past years of neglect, to grow everywhere the best possible crops and those most needed by the nation, and to carry the plow into every field capable of yielding more food. With the new weapons of power farming it became possible to tackle land that in the days of horses had been given up as hopeless, and to embark on extensive works of reclamation.
In some areas the job was drainage, the clearingout of farm ditches and main watercourses, and the drawing of mole drains through the clay to draw off the water from the waterlogged land. Elsewhere areas had to be cleared of trees and bushes and bracken and gorse, work for the largest crawler tractors and bulldozers, for axe and saw and fire. But it was work which in the absence of proper heavy tractors and machinery had often at first to be undertaken with old steam engines borrowed from showmen and painted with the slogans so well known to all who ride on merry-go-rounds at country fairs. In at least one instance an elephant was pressed into service to do the work of a tractor. Everywhere the need was for tractors, and particularly for heavy tractors and equipment.
The summer of 1940 was a period of frantic digging. The Army was digging coast defenses and driving great anti-tank ditches across the face of the land. There was digging of trenches and air-raid shelters, and digging of gardens and allotments by people who knew that in this way alone could they be certain at least of having potatoes, carrots, and cabbages to live on if all else failed. All through the blitz winter, farmers and gardeners sweated to increase the acreage, and each new achievement opened new vistas to show what might still be done.
Enemy activity was often a serious nuisance, but it served only to increase the people’s resolve. Huge numbers of bombs were dropped on farmlands, and it took time to restore these areas to use. A few farms and other buildings connected with food production were destroyed and there were some casualties among farmers and their men from bombs and from machine guns.
A more serious complication was the time that had to be given to military training in the Home Guard. Invasion was expected, and intense preparations were made to turn ordinary citizens into soldiers. There was not so much drilling on village greens as there had been in the days when Napoleon was expected to land, but there was a great deal more training in modern weapons and anti-tank warfare. The countrymen who had in the last year or two learned to talk the jargon of tractors and power farming now quickly began to talk the language of modern warfare as well.
Somehow farmers and farm workers managed to find time for everything, although the weather was against them once more. The harvest of 1941 was sown and harvested, and before the fields were clear, work began again on a still larger program for 1942, at a time when it seemed impossible to do more.
But help was at hand from the United States. The American farmer prepared to deny himself the fertilizers and the machinery he wanted, to help his British comrades. The passage of the Lend-Lease Act in the spring of 1941 supplied the place of dollars that were beginning to run short and gave us the fertilizers, the seeds, the fuel, and above all the farm machinery that were necessary to expand our crop acreage, and so the grim year 1941 ended with the stage set for British agriculture to make another great effort for the harvest of 1942.
3
WITH the end of the year came Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States and Japan into the World War. At last the United States was not only helping but fighting by our side. But at first the immediate results were to aggravate the food and shipping situation. Losses of ships along the United States seaboard were serious: the navies had to face battles and losses in the Far East and the longer runs of convoys. Shipping routes were greatly interrupted between Britain and Australia and New Zealand, the countries from which we draw fats, butter, and meat. The loss of the Philippines and Malaya spelled shortages of rubber and binder twine.
Again we turned to America, this time for more combines as well as other machinery: combines save both twine and labor. And there were many other needs.
Barely was the harvest gathered when demands on shipping became even more insistent. Losses were heavy. Aid must go at all costs to Russia and over the long, long route to our forces in North Africa. Shipbuilding in America was going up by leaps and bounds, but even so it could not yet meet requirements.
Once again the call for assistance went out to the home farmers, for it was principally on food imports that shipping could be saved. Whatever their doubts about the resources of labor, fertilizers, and machinery, whatever their doubts about maintaining the fertility of their land, whatever their doubts about the possibility of gathering the harvest, still more crops must be sown. In just the same spirit were the convoys sailing for Russia with the knowledge in every sailor’s heart that not all would arrive.
The response surprised the most optimistic. A further million and a half acres of permanent grass were converted to arable land and more than a million acres added to the wheat crop alone. In four years our agriculture has been transformed; the scenery of the countryside has changed.
If you had talked quietly to any farmer in 1940 and asked him how he could increase his food production, he would have ticked off on his fingers the things he would need: fertilizers, seeds, fencing, tractors, plows, drills, binders, and other machinery, but most of all labor— perhaps half as many men again as he was employing at that time. If you had said to him, “My friend, you’re not going to get any more men; you’re going to lose some of those you’ve got,” well, he’d have doubted if he could increase his food production at all. Yet in fact he and his workers have done it, with some extra labor in the form of the Women’s Land Army, volunteer workers from schools and towns at harvest time, and Italian prisoners.
We must now fill in the gaps. There will still be reclamation in the fens and hillsides — still vast areas to drain; but speaking generally we have reached about the limit of tillage acreage which can be handled with the resources available. But much remains to be done. More livestock are required to consume the greater area of restorative crops (temporary leys and roots) that must necessarily now be grown, for land cannot go on growing grain year after year without rotational cropping. And not only the quantity but the quality of our livestock calls for attention. Though Britain has been, and is, the source of the best livestock in the world, there is still too wide a gap between the standards of the best breeders and the small farmer.
In every direction we must carry on the task of maximum production for perhaps four more years to play our part in relieving a starving Europe. Much educational and propaganda work lies to hand if we are to fulfill this program. We proclaimed 1943 as the crisis year of the war. The International Food Conferences bid us prepare for a post-war period of crisis, to the resolving of which we must make our contribution.
This then is a brief picture of our home food production campaign — demand following demand for the four years of war, each one greater and seemingly more difficult to fulfill than the last. The result? The 1942 harvest showed an increased output from the land of 70 per cent. The total acreage under tillage increased 53 per cent — wheat 35 per cent, oats 72 per cent, potatoes 80 per cent, and vegetables 55 per cent — with higher figures still for 1943. Dairy cattle increased even with imported feeding stuffs reduced from 8.5 to 1.3 million tons.
We in England still hear the air-raid siren and the sound of bombs from time to time. Ships are still sunk as they bring us our food. Our enemies are still strong. We cannot yet relax our efforts, so that there may be food both for ourselves and for the very large numbers of American and Canadian troops whom we welcome among us; so that there may be ships set free for the great operations of war that lie ahead; so that we may make our contribution to the feeding of liberated peoples.
And what of the more distant future? A recent article in an agricultural journal indicated that this was a question that American farmers were one and all asking. It is the same with their British comrades on the farming front here. Is the primary producer once again to have to face dire depression? Is an impoverished world once again going to regard him as of no account? I think not. Full nutrition of the human race, if it can be gradually achieved, might well project such a possibility for a hundred years, and forty-four nations have recently declared that better nutrition will be their policy. Again, more efficient farming and also more efficient distribution are capable of profoundly influencing the price structures of most countries. Lastly, the realization that the fate of primary producers everywhere is one indivisible world problem will surely lead to that full coöperation between the leading nations of the world which has never yet come into existence.
Let all who till the land go forward not only with energy but with hope and confidence. Let the nations not seek to steal a share of one another’s birthrights. Let us not argue about this crop or that crop. Let us remember the reason for it all, the most important crop of all — men.