Читать книгу Footsteps in the Furrow - Andrew Arbuckle - Страница 14

Despite remaining one of the main industries in Scotland, over the past century farming has seen a slow, but consistent fall in the numbers of people employed. One hundred years ago, some 209,000 people worked the land. That was equivalent to more than 10% of the total workforce. By 2000, there were fewer than 30,000 full-time workers on Scottish farms, just over 0.5% of the total population.

The first major decline in the numbers employed on farms came during World War I. Recruitment posters with Lord Kitchener pointing out, ‘Your Country Needs You’, along with a heady dose of patriotism, saw the biggest-ever reduction in manpower on farms. During that period, one local Union chairman said, ‘There was no doubt that agricultural men were of the best type. They had more stamina than two men. It was strong men that were needed for the war effort.’

Within a matter of four years, more than a third of all male farm workers had enlisted. And where did they end up? The answer is both simple and desperately sad: the vast majority ended up under the soil in a foreign land, as anyone who visits the vast yet neatly kept cemeteries close to the battlefields in France and Belgium can see.

To fill the gap, more women were employed and the same period saw the arrival of the Women’s Land Army. The same Union chief also had a view about female labour on the farm: ‘They have already proven to be very useful and I have heard very good reports of women, but they are no use for driving a pair of horse.’

After the Armistice in 1918, when the surviving troops came home, few former farm workers returned to the land. Initially, wages rose as farmers who had made big profits in the latter years of the war attempted to ensure that their farms were in full production with full staff complements. However, as imports swamped the home market and prices plunged, wages were cut and discontent emerged.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the numbers of farm workers continued to dwindle. This was not a profitable time in the industry and wages meant money going out of the farm. Many of the West Coast farmers setting up in Fife attributed their survival in these hard times to being able to work the farm solely with members of their own families.

World War II saw another drift of farm workers from the land as they went off to fight the enemy. Meanwhile, those left behind picked up the skills needed to operate the tractors and other labour-saving machinery. This post-war surge into more and more mechanisation underlined the fact that the days of having large farm staffs were gone forever. However, there were still some shortages and the Union felt obliged to try and recruit workers from local towns. This had mixed success. One farmer reckoned town dwellers thought that ‘any duffer can do farm work – but that is not the case.’

More recently, Fife may be one of the few areas where employment connected with farming and food production has stabilised. The introduction of labour-intensive commercial soft fruit and vegetable enterprises has brought with it a need for large numbers of harvesting hands. These seldom go into the full-time employed category and the official agricultural employment statistics do not reflect their numbers.