Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), pp. 205–228

This paper considers the financial effects of the government’s direction of agriculture in the pastoral uplands of England during the Great War through a study of the West Ward in Westmorland. The paper aims to identify which farmers gained most from an agricultural production policy which enforced a shift to arable cultivation in areas unsuited to it. It considers wartime production at the county, parish and individual farm level and describes a wide variety of individual outcomes resulting from variations in topography, climate, landholding, farm size, labour structure and the extent of wartime intervention. A more general pattern is superimposed on the micro level and the paper shows that it was the most marginal farmers at the highest elevations who were least disrupted by wartime direction and who saw the greatest increases in net cash returns. 

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