AS A TOWNSMAN, I am diffident about venturing an opinion
on agricultural matters; but surely the latest PEP pamphlet, Agriculture and Land- use, is wrong when it argues that the trouble with English farms is that they are too small? Some of the most efficient agricultural producers in the world, notably the Danes, have farms of an even smaller average size; for certain types of 'pro- duction, the smallness is a definite asset, partly because it is in the owner's interest to cultivate it intensively. The weakness of British farms, in my=admittedly limited—experience, is that they are not conducted on business-like lines. How can one man expect to be an expert planner, buyer, machine-minder, accountant and salesman, as well as being a farmer? The Danes got over this successfully by establishing co-operatives to take some of the load off the small farmer's shoulders. Why the co-operative idea has not developed here, I do not know; the lack of it means that many small farms are little better than rural slums. But it's not their size that's the matter : it is their lack of organisation.
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