Agricultural restructuring in a Devon Parish: A new chapter in an old story

Abstract

The structure of the agricultural industry has undergone significant change over the last century, both in the UK and internationally, with post-war shifts towards larger and more owner-occupied farms being well recorded. The extent and detail of more recent agricultural restructuring in England deserves close attention because there are important shortcomings in the key source of official data (the Defra June survey), which obscure the realities of restructuring by inadequately representing unconventional tenure arrangements and overlooking very small farms. This has contributed to an under-recognition of what we consider to be a new phase of agricultural restructuring, beginning in the 1980s and continuing today, in which tenure arrangements have become increasingly complex and capital increasingly concentrated into the hands of fewer operators, many of which are not the family-run businesses that previously characterised the industry. Using a case study parish in Devon, England, we use a range of data sources in order to explore the details of restructuring between 1941 and 2016. Historical information from the National Farm Survey (1941–1943) was analysed alongside contemporary information from the Land Registry in order to spatially map and track changes in farm sizes and occupancy during this period, with the assistance of a Geographical Information System (ArcGIS). A key informant personally familiar with the farms (and their histories) supplemented this data, providing crucial information that was missing from official data sources. Our findings provide a detailed, hitherto unseen picture of agricultural restructuring at a local level, which demonstrates the importance of attending to the presence of complex tenure arrangements not always represented in official data.