The extent and impact of the 1940 and 1941 “plough-up” campaigns on farming across the South Downs, England

Abstract

The decades around World War II are considered a turning point in the fortunes of British agriculture that witnessed significant change in its structure and operation. The exigencies of World War II prompted the British government to initiate a National Farm Survey (NFS) of all farmers with over 5 acres (2.03 ha) of land in 1941–1943 in conjunction with the plough-up campaign and food rationing in order to avoid food shortages The NFS became available to researchers through the National Archives in the mid-1990s and is unparallelled as a national source of spatial and socio-economic data about individual farms. It comprises two main interrelated documentary data sets: the 1941 June Agricultural Census Returns; and the Primary Record detailing the condition of the holding and the farmer. The latter also includes information about the plough-up campaigns of 1940 and 1941 and identifies the fields destined to be brought into crop production. Additionally the NFS includes large scale Ordnance Survey topographic maps annotated with farm boundaries.This paper, linked to a larger project relating to farm occupancy in the pre- and post-World War II decades, focuses on the plough-up campaign data in the NFS for a statistical population of over 500 farms in a group of contiguous parishes stretching across the South Downs, in south-east England. It explores the extent of the wartime plough-up and its potential impact on landscape change in the subsequent peacetime decades. It thereby contributes to our understanding of the impact of the Second World War on farming and the agricultural landscape in mid-twentieth century England.