In 1914, the proportion of the British population engaged in agriculture was lower than in all of the other belligerents. Contemporary observers perceived that this placed Britain at a disadvantage in the event of a protracted war. As nations like Russia, pre-war exporters of food with large peasant populations able to feed themselves, redirected exports to service the demands of the home market, Britain would quickly starve.
[23] In practice, the pre-war contraction of British agriculture meant that plentiful reserves of underused land existed across the country. The availability of land combined with higher prices offered to farmers for their goods, which incentivised production to replace decreases in imports.
According to Peter Dewey, “the most striking feature of wartime agriculture was its stability”.
[24] Whereas in continental Europe, agricultural production fell by about one-third during the war, the supply of food in Britain was maintained almost intact. This was achieved despite the loss to British farmers of two essential factors of production from 1914: alongside men from the agricultural sector, the army required colossal numbers of horses. Following military impressment, the number of horses available for agriculture in Britain fell from 926,820 in 1914 to 858,032 the following year.
[25] Supplies of fertiliser and animal feeds were also heavily affected by the dislocation of trade, but the government was initially reluctant to label agriculture as an “essential” war industry and thereby acquire control over its direction.
In the opening two years of the war actual food shortages were localized and of relatively short duration. Nevertheless, complaints about increased food prices and accusations of
profiteering were prevalent throughout the war: “as the war progressed, shortages and inflationary pressures increased, and demands for state intervention became more persistent”.
[26] The Food Production Department was constituted in January 1917, with a policy to utilise Britain’s underexploited land for arable cultivation, guarantee prices for farmers, and provide minimum wages of 25s per week for farm workers.
[27] Farmers demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with directives issued by the Food Production Department, but were restricted by shortages of labour, horses, machinery, fertiliser, and animal feeds.
Attempts to relieve the shortage of labour included the formation of Agricultural Companies, comprised of soldiers in medical category C3, the temporary return of skilled farmworkers (most notably ploughmen) from the front,
prisoners of war (POWs), women, and children. By the end of the war, 60.5 percent of POWs available for work in Britain were employed in agriculture, whilst the Women’s Land Army provided a maximum working strength of 16,000 to complement the approximately 180,000 village women employed in agriculture. Across Britain, increasing numbers of children obtained exemptions from school to engage in agricultural work during the harvest season and worked part-time on farms outside of school hours.
[28] Their contributions, in Dewey’s estimates, reduced the fall in the agricultural labour supply from 9 percent of the pre-war total in 1916 to around 4 percent by 1918.
Their endeavours meant that home food production was restored to pre-war levels, but output in meat and milk decreased in the final year of the war for want of animal feed. However, each ton of home-grown food reduced the stress placed on British shipping for imported goods, and nationwide
rationing in Britain was implemented late in the war compared to other European countries. It was not until early 1918 that rationing was instituted in Britain, and British consumers did not suffer the same decline in nutritional standards as their counterparts overseas. The content of the British diet changed more than its nutritional value. At its lowest point, in 1917, the calorific value of the average British diet was only 4 percent lower than in 1913, and across the war as a whole the diets and health of women and poor children improved.
[29] To maintain the calorific consumption of the population, meat was replaced with bacon, brown bread substituted for white bread (but bread itself was not rationed, unlike elsewhere), and margarine replaced butter.
[30] The British diet may have become more bland and monotonous as the war progressed, but Britain did not come close to succumbing to the starvation predicted by pre-war commentators. Ultimately, British agriculture performed well between 1914 and 1918.