Footsteps in the Furrow. Andrew Arbuckle
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way across the country. It was possible, with a little planning, to move entire farms – livestock, goods and chattels – by train. Many of those coming eastwards would milk their dairy cattle in the morning in their old farm in the west and then carry out the afternoon’s milking at the new base. Some hired whole trains to carry out their flitting. When John Steven came to Stravithie, outside St Andrews, his bill from the railway company for moving the lock, stock and barrel of his farm across Scotland was £39 10/-. This might be multiplied by twenty times to cater for a century of financial inflation and still it would be a tremendous bargain.
Another family making the same move eastwards were the Logans, who came to Dairsie Mains complete with their herd of Ayrshire milking cows. Again, those cows were hand-milked in the west before going on the train, and as they settled down in their new home, they were milked in the afternoon. The Logan family also demonstrated considerable acumen as they sold turf from their new farm to help create the world-famous golf course at Carnoustie, and with the proceeds they bought another farm: Kirkmay at Crail.
Even with the advantage of coming east to farm, anyone regarding it as the Promised Land must have been labelled optimistic in the early years of the century. For the previous three decades from the 1870s, agriculture had slipped into a deep depression. Long gone were the golden days of the earlier 1800s, when the protection afforded by the Corn Laws – import tariffs designed to support domestic British corn prices against competition from less expensive foreign imports – produced prosperity never before or since seen in the countryside.
During those years of plenty, investment in agriculture transformed the landscape. Many of the farm steadings in the country were built around this time to house livestock, store crops and shelter machinery. Drainage and the general improvement of soils through liming and marling (adding clay to improve light, sandy soil) also came about in this period of abundance.
With the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the subsequent surge of imports to help feed the newly industrialised population in the UK, the economics of agriculture within those shores collapsed. As the rich and massive prairie hinterland of America opened up and the plows – American spelling – cut open the vast grasslands, once roamed by buffalo, imports of grain began in large quantities, thus destroying the home market in the 1870s. As a direct consequence, the acreage on corn in the UK fell by 25% in the 20-year period between 1873 and 1893.
From the other side of the globe, imports of mutton flooded in from New Zealand and Australia after it was found to be economically possible to ship meat for as little as two pennies per pound, or 2p per kilo. Even when the cost of transport and the cheaper initial price of the lamb were added up, the total was still far less than the home-produced product. A similar story of cheap beef from South America undercut the UK market to the extent that numbers of beef cattle in the UK were 20% fewer in 1900 than only ten years previously.
In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the consequence of all those cheap imports was that prices were halved. One quarter of the agricultural workers left the land in that same period. Farms fell into dereliction or were reduced to grass as the practice of growing more expensive crops was abandoned. Many tenant farmers simply vanished, leaving the landlord with empty farms.
As they entered the twentieth century, farmers in the UK recognised that their fortunes depended not on how they managed their own costs, but on how their government controlled imports. This position has remained constant throughout the last 100 years and will persist in the future.
As will be seen, only in times of shortage or privation do governments place importance on the home production of food. At all other times, the benefits of cheap food to the wider economy dominate the political thought process.
During the pre-war hard times when they were getting low prices for their produce, farmers did what farmers could do better than most and that was to tighten their belts and cut costs. This rule applies to the present day and comes into play whenever the economic barometer hits the floor. Often it sees land, once ploughed, revert to being grassed over, with livestock running extensively. ‘Dog-and-stick farming’ it is called, employed by many a successful farmer for his survival. Reducing the amount of money going down the farm road and off the farm may not have been the recipe for high-living, but often ensured the ability to continue living on the land.
It was reckoned that for many the main outgoings on many of the farms in the first decade of the century were limited to paying blacksmith’s bills and the small pittance that workers received for wages and a few essentials, such as clothes and food. Even the food that was bought was often obtained under a barter system, with eggs and butter exchanged for salt and spices that could not be home produced.
Even with self-imposed austerity, some farmers could not see their way through the Depression. One such example saw the disappearance in 1912 of Thomas Hunter White, the tenant of Drumrack farm outside St Andrews, halfway through his agreed tack, or term of lease. A local banker, Henry Watson, received a letter from an advisor in the Edinburgh and East of Scotland College of Agriculture telling him of the situation. Mr Watson, who had always wanted to farm, asked for a description of the farm. Back came the letter:
The whole farm is deplorably dirty. It is ostensibly down to grass but it will require to be sown again. The steading is antiquated and has fallen into a state of disrepair. The cottages are bad and would require to be gutted. The farm has been culpably neglected.
Mr Watson took the farm and now, almost 100 years later, his family still farms the same unit. Possibly unwittingly, he had chosen a period when farming was moving into a short period of profitability.
What many farmers and politicians did not know or did not recognise in the first decade of the last century was that Britain would shortly be engulfed in the largest conflict ever experienced: World War I.
To prove that modern politicians do not have a monopoly on daft statements, in 1903 the Board of Agriculture, the then equivalent of the Ministerial Department responsible for the farming industry, produced a report on food supplies. It stated: ‘There is no risk of cessation of supplies, no reasonable probability of serious interference with them and even with a maritime war, there will be no material diminution of their volume.’ Little more than a decade after that imperious statement, German warships sank shiploads of wheat, oats, beef and lamb destined for Britain.
At the start of the war in 1914, more than half the food consumed in the UK came in from abroad. Five years later, at the end of the war, British farmers were producing two-thirds of the food for a hungry home population. And they did so profitably. Even if rationing helped prevent the worst excesses of profiteering, farmers benefited from price increases and ready markets for their produce. Andy McLaren, of Nether Strathkinness, St Andrews, will be among the last of a generation to remember the latter years of that war being hungry ones, with food rationing having to be brought into play.
That war, with prowling enemy ships sinking boats full of food coming into Britain, first sharpened the nation’s attention to food security. Whatever words are used, it was the war that brought home to this island nation the fact that importing food during conflict brought hazards, such as shipping supply lines being cut by the enemy.
Even before the last guns of war sounded, the then government was planning legislation that would provide a guaranteed price for wheat and oats. It was 1920 before the Agricultural Act actually came into being, with its promise of a minimum price of 95 shillings per quarter for both wheat and oats. But within months of this financial protective shield, food imports again swamped the country. Much to the annoyance of the recently created National Farmers Union of Scotland, the government, faced with high post-war unemployment, decided to ditch the Act as a quick way of lowering the price of food.
The vast majority of farming in Fife in the early years of the last century was carried out through the tenancy system. Even though there were no large-scale landlords in Fife, such as can be seen throughout the rest of Scotland, many private landlords in the county had small, tenanted estates. Fife landlords had been characterised by the saying that they ‘had a wee puckle land, a doo’cot, and a law suit’, which translates into their ownership of a small acreage of land, a pigeon loft for food and a penchant for argument. In