The formation and subsequent work of the committees did not take place on a blank sheet. They were the products of experience, trial and error and the vicissitudes of interwar economic and political change. So now we set the scene by examining the prewar countryside to see the difficulties within which farming operated and the growth of government intervention and assistance.

All was not well in the British countryside in the 1920s and 1930s. In comparison with the prosperous later years of the First World War and through to 1921, it certainly seemed to contemporaries that arable farming struggled, and furthermore that few in the expanding urban areas cared, and indeed that cheap food was prized by governments above any agricultural concerns. And this was certainly true. Cereal producers, once the most prestigious exponents of ‘high farming’ in eastern England, now found profits considerably reduced. In turn cereal acreages fell annually and grassland, of varying quality, was to be found more often instead. And the landscape too looked increasingly unkempt in many localities, with hedges and ditches ignored, bracken infestation increasing, fences untended and buildings patched. Some land was effectively abandoned altogether since it seemed senseless to cultivate marginal soils only to make a financial loss. Farming retained an old-fashioned air over much of the countryside. The county of Surrey, for example, with a reputation towards the end of the eighteenth century of being a well-cultivated and predominantly arable county, had a shrinking area of farmland, with less than 10 per cent remaining under the plough by 1938. Within reach of London some landowners made no pretence to farm their land at all. Robert Homewood found on the eve of the war that his landlord in the Sussex Weald ‘did not value land for its own sake, but as a playground, a place where he could wander at will to admire the scenery … a picture to be looked at’.

The depression was selective by sector, with large grain producers particularly badly hit, and the symbolic importance of wheat tarnished. Decline was a theme strongly voiced in the rural literature of the period, along the lines of ‘things were much better in the past’. But the reality was not necessarily much better.