Let’s Talk about Farm Amalgamation May 21, 2012

National Archives of the UK, MAF 142/457

In the early 1960s, British civil servants secretly contemplated how to rid the nation’s agricultural economy of inefficient, small-scale farmers.  Or, at least, that was how it might look if their deliberations became public before they had formulated any actual policy.  In reality, they were slowly and cautiously formulating a response to pressures being put on small farmers by market conditions.  Here are a few illustrative figures on farm sizes in Britain by size, adapted from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food’s (MAFF) A Century of Agricultural Statistics (1968):

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