On the land, every effort was being made to increase food production. In a message to The Farmers’ Weekly the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dornan-Smith – a popular figure, who had served with a Sikh regiment in India, and was a former President of the National Farmers’ Union – offered the magazine’s readers some stirring thoughts:
The fresh-turned furrows are our trenches: the added blades of grass are our bullets, and every extra sheaf of corn is a shell in this war of resources … The war is here in earnest, and two opposing ideas, freedom versus a ruthless tyranny, are locked in a grip in which one or other must die … The farmer is a key man in the events which now shake Western civilisation.
In response to the Government’s urgent appeal, agricultural machinery began pouring into the country: from America, under the Lend-Lease agreements made in the spring of 1941, came big Allis-Chalmers and Minneapolis-Molines tractors, but also small Ford Fergusons, built in Detroit under a contract signed in 1938 between the Irish engineer-inventor Harry Ferguson and Henry Ford Senior. Ferguson’s key innovation was the revolutionary three-point linkage, which attached the tractor to an implement (for instance a plough) with hydraulically operated arms, and in effect made the pair a single unit, instead of one pulling the other. During the war thousands of Ford Fergusons were made in America and shipped to Britain, and the three-point linkage has been taken up all over the world.
Besides tractors, Massey-Harris combine harvesters came in from America, Sunshine combines from Australia, and various types of drill for sowing seed. Crawler tractors went high up hillsides in the north of England and in Wales, ripping out bracken, which had invaded over two million acres and was useless as fodder, being poisonous to ruminants. A study by the Oxford Agricultural Research Institute worked out that ploughing with a horse and a single-furrow plough cost 12s per acre, whereas a two- or three-furrow tractor cost just over 9s per acre – and the tractor could cover at least four times as much ground in a day.
With American imports pouring in, the number of tractors available to farmers increased so fast that in 1941 190 Oxford undergraduates (a third of them girls) were given instruction in the basics of driving and maintenance and sent to a hundred public and secondary schools to pass on their skills to older boys. Each instructor was detailed to take on twenty-four boys of sixteen or over, who would learn to drive ‘dead straight’, and to back a two-wheel trailer between stakes (no easy task). They were also to learn about servicing, ‘the meaning and use of the grease gun and nipples’. The idea of fitting tractors with cabs was still so new that a photograph of a man ploughing steep ground at Almondbank in Perthshire was captioned: ‘The cab on this caterpillar tractor makes the driver independent of good weather.’
Some farmers invented methods of their own for speeding production. One was Jack Hatt, who hitched four implements in line behind a powerful tractor and proclaimed the virtues of PPDH – Plough, for turning the furrows over, Press, for levelling, Drill, for sowing the seed, and Harrow, for working it in. By this means he was able to cover enormous acreages, saving time and fuel.
On waterlogged land, especially in the clay of East Anglia, ploughing had to be preceded by the restoration or creation of drains – and here again astonishing results were achieved. By February 1943 the Government had sanctioned 10,380 mole-drainage schemes, 19,725 tile-drainage schemes, 66,011 farm-ditch schemes and 5338 schemes for small areas. The land improved extended to more than four and a half million acres. One outstanding success was the reclamation of 400 acres on Ferrymoor Common in Yorkshire, which until then had been used as a camping ground by gypsies, but after treatment yielded huge crops of potatoes, wheat, oats, rye, clover and turnips.
The frenzy of ploughing led to some unforeseen results. One was that on upland farms the pastures on which dairy cattle had been grazing disappeared under corn, and the cows had to move to higher ground. Up there, however, there was often no water, so that the Government had to offer farmers 50 per cent grants to install piped systems.
So urgent was the need to increase food production that the Government declared war on all species which it reckoned were inhibiting farmers’ efforts. The first and foremost enemies were rabbits; thousands of acres round the edges of fields close to woods and spinneys were being eaten to the ground, yielding only a quarter of their potential output. Norman Sharpe, gamekeeper on the Apley Hall estate in Shropshire, attributed their proliferation to the fact that control measures had been abandoned during the Great War, and remembered how some of the fields bordering the Spring Copse at Apley Hall ‘simply appeared to be moving of an evening’.
On a farm at Linkenholt in Hampshire four guns killed 940 rabbits in a morning, but that made little difference, and the owner became so desperate that he decided to wire in his whole estate. This drastic solution took fourteen miles of rabbit netting, four feet tall, with a mesh of 1⅝ inches, and with the bottom turned outwards horizontally so that rabbits outside the pale could not burrow underneath. Those that remained inside were exterminated by gun, dog, trap, snare and gas; and although fiendishly expensive, the experiment was reckoned to have paid off in the amount of crops saved.
If live rabbits were a menace, dead ones were very popular. On one farm near Newton-by-the-Sea, on the Northumbrian coast, the assembled villagers killed 250 out of a single field of corn, whereupon the chief vermin-catcher gave one to everybody present and loaded the rest into his Austin Seven. He and the farmer then drove to the Ship Inn to celebrate their record bag, but got so drunk that when they reached home they failed to empty the car – only to find, in the morning, that most of their cargo had disappeared.
As for rats – the annual damage done by them was estimated at £12 million (over £600 million in today’s terms), and Mr E. C. Read, later technical adviser to the Ministry, quoted the cost of every rat as 30s a year. The Ministry commissioned a study to determine the cost of rat-proofing corn stacks with circular walls of corrugated-iron sheets, sunk two feet into the ground and protruding four feet above it. Estimating that 411,000 stacks would have been needed to store the 1939 harvest, researchers concluded that the cost of corrugated iron for 1940 would be £2,719,000. Since this was clearly prohibitive, the Ministry urged farmers to use every means to destroy the vermin: ‘Spring traps, wire traps, snares, sunk pit traps, barrel traps, break-back traps and varnish traps, known as sticky boards.’
In October 1940 the Minister, invoking the Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act of 1919, announced that the annual Rat Week should be held, ‘notwithstanding the war’. Everyone in the country was asked to ‘take concerted action against these vermin’. The success or failure of the initiative was not recorded – but the Pied Piper himself could hardly have matched the performance of Louth Rural District Council, in Lincolnshire, which in the previous November had begun paying 2d for each rat’s tail handed in. By 31 March 1940 almost 42,500 rats had been destroyed. This astonishing cull must have reduced the local population substantially; but as Country Life declared, ‘A combined effort is necessary for their extermination. Every method must be brought to bear simultaneously – rat-hunts, gassing, poisoning, trapping, and particularly the surrounding of ricks before thrashing.’ The Government was doing its best. ‘Kill that rat!’ cried one of its posters. ‘Rats rob us of food. Rats spread disease. Rats delay our victory.’
The Ministry also turned its fire on the poor house sparrow. A pamphlet emphasized the bird’s destructive habits – pecking blossoms of currants and gooseberries, eating whatever seedlings it could reach, and, at harvest time, flocking to the fields to devour huge quantities of corn. A ‘wanton pest’, the sparrow was said to destroy fledglings of other species. The campaign was welcomed by many War Ags, including