Just before the Second World War in the 1930s, British farming was at the end of a long depression, partly caused by cheap grain imported from the North American prairies since the 1870s. Most farms were small, tenanted and mixed, with little surplus to sell on, and many were in a poor state of repair and partial abandonment.
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Before war broke out in 1939, an astonishing 70% of British food was imported: 70% of our cheese, sugar and cereals; nearly 80% of our fruit; more than half our meat; as well as much animal feed and fertiliser to support domestic production. Moves had been made to rejuvenate and underpin British farming prior to the war but when it began, Nazi Germany occupied most Western European countries, attacking shipping routes then bombing ports: the threat and intention of mass starvation and capitulation was real.
A gargantuan national effort was needed to bring the land into service. Calculations surmised that one acre of permanent grass (for grazing animals and hay for winter) fed one to two people, an acre of wheat fed 20 people and an acre of potatoes fed 40. The latter were also heavy, bulky items to transport and merchant shipping needed to be freed up.
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In autumn 1939, County War Agricultural Executive Committees, known as the ‘War Ag’, were reestablished from the First World War, to survey, advise and monitor the efficient running of each farm: a type of wartime farmers’ Ofsted (the UK’s national regulator and inspector for education).
Committees were given sweeping powers that filtered down to district sub-committees of influential locals and respected farmers. In October 1940, Winston Churchill’s speech to the National Farmers’ Union was emphatic: “We rely on the farmers… the farms of Britain are the front line of freedom!” It was an urgent rallying cry – and it was answered. The ‘National Farm’ was born.
The great plough-up
With an already depleted rural workforce, the Women’s Land Army – and later, the use of prisoners of war, holiday harvest camps, Scout and Guide groups and time out of school for older children – helped alleviate the acute labour shortage.
Farmers were supported in the ‘great plough-up’ of millions of acres of pasture and uncultivated land, straightening streams and digging ditches to drain unproductive fields, and in embracing new technology and machinery. Potatoes, wheat and sugar beet were prioritised as crops, with potato production increasing by nearly 75% and wheat doubling between 1939 and 1945. Windsor Great Park became ‘the largest cornfield in Britain’.
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Prior to the war, Britain had been slow to invest in the new agricultural machinery and technology of the ‘green revolution’. On most farms, such as my local one in Berkshire, owned and run by a pioneering Miss White, improvements were stop-start. Machinery and parts weren’t always available, or broke down. Long-retired equipment was dragged from the nettles and repurposed; horse-drawn carts were adapted to be pulled by tractors, and old cars – one which Miss White’s farmworker offered to ‘thatch’ to repair its torn roof – were co-opted. The old ran alongside the new when it could be had or shared.
Although the number of tractors in use increased from 56,000 to 203,000 over the course of the war, horses were still a much-valued asset, coming into their own after petrol rationing. Miss White’s first state-of-the-art American Allis Chalmers crawler tractor and four-furrow Ransome plough sank to the bottom of the Atlantic to plough the seabed forever after the ship carrying it was torpedoed.
Yet she took her farm from horse power, gang labour, threshing machines and beautifully thatched ricks to tractors and the first combine harvester in just 15 years, renovating her farmworkers’ tumbledown cottages and installing water and electric for all on the way.
WWII's legacy on farming
In 2023, according to DEFRA, 38% of British food was imported and 62% homegrown, including 93% of our cereals. The ‘self-sufficiency measure’ (the foods that can be grown in the UK) was at 75%. The state intervention of 1940s wartime Britain and the immediate years after are often referenced in debate about the countryside, for good reason. A sustained, heroic and necessary effort on the rural home front, that also embraced many urban lives in the form of landworkers and evacuees, had a profound and lasting effect.
It is a polarised period of history that undoubtedly saved a country from starvation, improved rural lives and became a kind of ‘poster girl’ for what the nation was fighting for. But the rapid modernisation and intensification of the farming industry, under government directives, set a direction, mindset and pattern in motion that has ultimately claimed victims, too, in its devastating and continued impacts on the climate and nature crises.
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So much of the sentiment, practice and approach to agriculture linger on from this time. State intervention in the way of policy and subsidy has continued, often seemingly in unfair, short-lived or counterproductive directions. Much of the rural landscape and its wildlife was sacrificed in the war effort and continues to be destroyed in the drive for cheaper foods – though it’s not sure who really benefits. We pay for cheap food in other ways.
Farmers are pushed and pulled between consumer and Government demands and ideologies, needs and blame – becoming both heroes and villains. Dr Ollie Douglas, curator of collections at The Museum of English Rural Life, explains: “By the time war ended and as others struggled, farmers were seen as uncaring of land and ‘feather-bedded’, luxuriating in extra subsidies and the extractive value of development.” What was laid down in the 1940s, and reinforced with the 1947 Agriculture Act, presented us with bitter challenges of an existential kind further down the line.
Food production is a big driver of the nature and climate crisis, but is also affected by it. Most people are separated from the land and how their food is grown while farmers are often left poorly rewarded for what they produce, are misunderstood and unsupported in farming that would benefit nature.
Will Batt, farmer and estate manager of a 809-hectare arable farm in the North Wessex Downs – where I live, and in part on land farmed by Miss White in the 1940s and ’50s – says: “It’s not just how we feed the growing population sustainably, justly and securely, it’s how not to exacerbate an increasingly unstable climate, even as we work in it, and it’s how to stop, then reverse the effects of farm wildlife loss. It’s the challenge of our time.”
A modern National Farm?
It’s a deeply complex and emotive affair, but there is no doubt that farms in Britain, and the workforce adopted to help, rallied in united effort, under the idea of a National Farm, to save the day. We are facing a growing crisis again – a multiple of crises, with food security and the war in Europe, climate breakdown, nature loss, health and the cost of living becoming urgent issues. Yet we seem unable to grasp the interconnectedness of these challenges to be met, by a greater extent, through farming and land use, which is coming under pressure like never before.
Isn’t it time for a national scale rethink and a rematch of that wartime effort, on a similar, if very different, scale? If so, it must be one where farmers and the public are not only central to the conversation but are having those grassroots conversations between themselves.
In a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s On Your Farm programme, Nottinghamshire organic beef and arable farmers Debra and Tom Willoughby spoke to broadcaster Anna Jones about inviting the public to ‘Get On My Land’ by offering volunteering opportunities and family fun days. Former dairy farmers, the Willoughbys have dedicated part of their farm to agroforestry – combining agriculture with, in this case, productive fruit and nut trees that will help support soil, water and air quality, reduce flooding and contribute to the UK’s net-zero climate targets. Locally employed people and volunteers planted 11,900 trees.
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Debra says: “Things have got to change, farmers have got to be closer to the public and it’s such a resource for the [public’s] wellbeing and joy, and ours, too.” If people feel safe and welcomed on farms, she feels they have then also “got your back”. Tom adds: “The problem is the disconnect between the public, food and farming – and it’s trying to understand that link and bring people nearer to the farm.” On Grange Farm, everyone quite literally has a stake in the land and what it produces.
Dr Ollie Douglas agrees a farming reset is vital, but says: “It’s about more than farming, and farmers can’t go it alone. They shouldered a burden in the 1940s and in place of thanks received half a century of criticism for changes that were imposed upon them. A reset will require us to find common ground.”
The future of farming
Countryside charity CPRE is calling for an urgent reassessment of the Agricultural Land Classification system relied on to plan cropping on our most productive farmland. Outdated and now unreliable, it’s based upon climate and soil data collected between 1941 and 1980 and doesn’t account for degradation of lowland peatland, for example, or a 60% increase in flood risk on the highest-grade farmland. Neither does it consider the growing pressure for other land use: housing, climate change mitigation, renewable energy, nature restoration, green public space and food security for all.
The Government is consulting on a new, strategic Land Use Framework for England that will hopefully be the first important step towards a comprehensive farming and land reset. However, with little warning it has pulled the Sustainable Farming Incentive, only set up in 2022, to pay farmers to boost nature recovery.
Douglas says: “To address the polycrisis we must do things they didn’t do mid-century. Land reform is essential. Subsidies must be bespoke and geared towards bringing farmers together with local communities and they must favour farming that works with nature rather than against it.”
We may not be on a war footing, but the challenges are building.
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Top image: members of the Women's Land Army receive instructions on operating a Standard Fordson tractor and plough attachment on 15th August 1939 at the Monmouthshire Institute of Agriculture at Usk in Monmouthshire. Credit: Getty
