The previous chapters, dealing with research and development, education and advice, and agricultural policy, have been concerned with the context within which technical change took place in the agricultural industry in the UK. They have demonstrated that, at a national level, there was a more or less consistent policy over the fifty years between the mid-1930s and the mid-1980s to increase agricultural output, and that after about 1950 this was accompanied by a desire also to increase efficiency. Both of these objectives were supported by considerable investment, on the part of both the state and the ancillary industries, especially the feed, fertiliser, pesticide, and agricultural machinery industries, in research, development, education, and advice to farmers. The following chapters are concerned with the impact of these policies and investments. They deal with the impact of technical change at both the national and the farm level and examine in particular the processes involved in adopting new technologies.

If, as we argued in chapter 1, the adoption of technology is contingent upon individual circumstances, it follows that these need to be followed up in greater detail. Each of the following chapters will therefore begin by examining the national picture, then go on to narrow the focus to the three south-western counties of England for which we have more detailed data, and finally examine the experience of individual farmers. We begin by examining technical change in dairy farming. The reason for this is not only that it was a major farming type in the south-west, but also because it was the farm type upon which the south-western FMS, from which our individual farm data is drawn, concentrated its efforts. From this study of dairying, we shall see that changes in breeding, feeding, and housing were significant. More generally, and applying not only to dairying but also to farming in general, there were also changes in capital and land, labour and machinery, specialisation and expansion, and in the fact that some enterprises declined, and each of these aspects will be the subject of succeeding chapters.

Developments in Dairy Farming

From the late 1930s to the 1980s, dairy farming was one of the most important single enterprises in UK farming, always accounting for at least 20 per cent of total output, and sometimes over 25 per cent.