Prior to World War 2, British agriculture was very traditional, avoiding mechanisation and modern methods in favour of skilled labour. The farming processes were inefficient, and the country imported the bulk of its food from overseas colonies.
The onset of war (and German U-Boat blockades) interrupted this supply and forced the government to fund dramatic improvement in farming across the country. Food production was doubled over the course of the war. Afterwards, concern about food supply meant that political pressure was exerted on farmers to bring the country to self-sufficiency. As a result sparking an agricultural revolution.
In the 1930s, British agriculture was in severe decline. The country had long relied on imported food from the British Empire to meet food demands, and as a result the Department of Agriculture was lacked funding and motivation to bring about improvement.[1]
Agricultural methods had little changed from the 1800s; relying on the man power of over a million labourers. Few tractors or other machinery were in use, with most heavy work still being horse powered. This lack of efficiency meant over 90% of the country's grain had to be imported. In fact, the low cost of importing food from the British Empire mean't that there was no motivation to invest in British farming. Because of this, the country had not undergone an agricultural revolution in tandem with its industrial revolution.[2]
However, World War 1 had disrupted the status quo; with blockades on food supply. Scrambling to address the country's food demands, the government created a Ministry of Food to control production and consumption. Despite this the war decimated British farming; in response the Agriculture Act was passed, in 1920, to guarantee food prices. This lasted only a year before being repealed (as ineffectual) and prices continued to slump.[1]
In a desperate attempt to regulate the market, the government empowered 1930s producers to form "marketing boards". But these struggled to establish a hold on their respective markets (only the potato board showed success). Meanwhile the amount of arable land in use was still declining rapidly.[3]
The outbreak of World War 2, in 1939, compounded the problem. External sources of food were cut off and the government were faced with a major food shortfall. A massive propaganda campaign began, focused on the general populace growing their own food. However, this would not be enough, and drastic measures were needed to bring British agriculture up to scratch.[2]
The Minister of Agriculture responded to the impending crisis by forming War Agricultural Executive Committees (WAEC), one committee per county in England and Wales (for a total of sixty one). In Scotland, where the counties were too small to be worth individual committees, forty two District Agricultural Executive Committees (DAEC) were established. The Executive Committees in turn managed a network of smaller groups, down to the parish level, their overall task was to quickly identify new arable farmland. The government would set a national acreage requirement which would steadily be broken down into smaller units, until parishes were tasked with finding a few acres for new crops.[4]
To be effective, however, the committees needed up to date information on land use in the countryside. In 1936 Sir Dudley Stamp had begun the Land Utilisation Survey of Britain, a major project to map farmland across the country. The Executive Committees realised that these maps could be used to help plan farming efforts. Based on Stamp's work, 300,000 farms were targeted for improvement - accounting for 5.5 million acres of new arable land. The government funded additional workers and machinery to make the selected farms more efficient.[2]
WAECs were handed significant powers, via the Defence Act, 1939. They could dictate agricultural land use anywhere in the country, even to the extent of evicting tenants to enforce their decisions. In addition they exercised control over the requisition and distribution of foodstuffs produced by British farmland.[4]
By the end of the war the improvements meant that food production in the country had almost doubled in the country.[2] The near disastrous state of agriculture during the wartime period caused the government to focus on further improvements in farming; with the aim of self-sufficiency. Farmers reacted with caution, as surplus production would result in plummeting prices. To mitigate this the government promised the buy up any surpluses to maintain the market rates.[5]
The war sparked an agricultural revolution; with a tenfold increase of investment in mechanisation over the next thirty years, and the loss of many thousands of farming jobs.[5]
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