Lately, for reasons that are far too baroque to go into, my wife and I have been looking at farm tenancy agreements from 1983. In a way they are deeply dull (all those drains and clauses about fence maintenance) but they are also fascinating in that they reveal how farming has changed.
If you were after a few fields for your sheep or cattle, back when Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ was riding high at no. 1, you had to really fork out. Ten pounds an acre, for pretty marginal land, was the going rate, and rent rises year on year were the order of the day. Fast forward 40 years and a lot of grazing is worth almost nothing. The most recent tenant on the patch of land we were researching was paying £1 an acre in 2017 and needless to say ten bob in the 1980s went a lot further than it does now.
So what changed? Well in a way, everything did. Back then, you were paid money by Brussels just for having livestock, and the beef and sheep price was solid, not least because supermarkets hadn’t yet become the price-setting monsters they are today. For those in cereals, things were also rosy in the early 1980s. Prices were high and because of post-war modernisation – including fertiliser and pesticide use – harvests were plentiful.
