Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 1 (2012), p. 139

As the subtitle suggests, this book has been written to commemorate the 75th anniversary in Wales of what is now called the Farm Business Survey. A little less than half of the text is concerned directly with the history of the Survey, while the rest covers the state of Welsh agriculture from the inter-war period to the present day.

Before 1985 the Farm Business Survey was known as the Farm Management Survey. It involves the collection of information on the outputs and inputs, in both physical and financial terms, from a sample of farms spread across England and Wales. Nationally some 2,000 farms have normally been involved, and the results from them have been used by the relevant Ministry (originally Agriculture and Fisheries, now DEFRA) to assess the annual changes in farm incomes across the country as a whole. Given the sensitivity of such detailed financial information, and the consequent likely reluctance of farmers to co-operate with civil servants, the Survey has always been carried out by investigation officers employed by university departments. Only after the data collected for individual farms had been anonymized was it sent to the Ministry. This process began in 1936, and continues to the present day. Chapters four to six trace its history from the viewpoint of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Aberystwyth University.

Although chapter four is entitled ‘The origins of the Farm Business Survey’, more than half of it is devoted to the development of the department of Agricultural Economics at Aberystwyth and the difficulties it faced because of the agricultural scientists who found it difficult to recognize economics as a serious discipline and the economists who looked down upon those who studied agriculture. The remainder, dealing more specifically with the establishment of the Survey itself, implies that the impetus for it came from the Conference of Provincial Agricultural Economists, the inter-war meeting point of agricultural economists in the various university departments. This may be how the story emerges from the perspective of a single university department, but we are told nothing about the wider intellectual context at the time. The inter-war period was, after all, one in which agricultural economists in other European countries and the United States were expanding data collection and analysis, both nationally and in international organizations such as the International Institute of Agriculture. More specifically, although the book mentions that the funding for the Survey came from the Treasury, it does not explain how the Treasury was persuaded to provide the necessary funding or how the Oxford Agricultural Economics Research Institute was persuaded to abandon its preference for alternative accounting methods.

The first three chapters tell the familiar twentieth-century story of an agriculture pushed about by external political and economic influences. There were the difficult years between the wars when, apart from the increasing production of milk for the liquid market, and rural electrification, traditional farming technolog-ies were maintained, while the landownership structure underwent dramatic change. The level of owner-occupation in Wales rose from nine per cent in 1909 to 39 per cent in 1936. Nevertheless, a ‘mild flavour of decay’ began to pervade the Welsh countryside as the traditional economy, society and culture began to ‘rot at the centre’ (p. 21). The need to maximize wartime food production saw a combination of mechanization and mixed farming begin to reverse this trend. Moore-Colyer’s account of this concentrates on the effects of the ‘quasi-fascist control’ exerted by the County War Agricultural Executive Committees. Dealing with the post-war period he again emphasizes the role of national and, latterly, European policies in determining the fate of a Welsh agriculture that was increasingly dependent upon government funding. The book is rounded off by a fascinating series of individual histories featuring farms that participated in the Survey. Two remain as full-time working farms, some rely on associated activities, such as golf courses or caravan sites, or have become part-time farms or residential holdings, and others have disappeared under housing developments.

In his familiar fluent and vigorous style, Moore-Colyer has produced a book which – despite the odd blemish (the first footnote in chapter one, for example, is inaccurate), and what this reviewer sees as the more serious misinterpretation of its origins – will introduce historians to the research possibilities of the Farm Management Survey, provide a readable introduction to the recent history of Welsh farming, and serve as a fitting memorial for several generations of Aberystwyth agricultural economists.