THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGRICULTURE

153

THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGRICULTURE J. T. Coppock University of Edinburgh

This paper is a review of the work of agricultural geographers, with particular reference to Great Britain and to points of contact with agricultural economics. After a consideration of objectives and of the geographer'sapproach to the study of agriculture, contributions made by geographers to an understanding of regional differences in British agriculture are reviewed. Developments made possible by the advent of the electronic digital computer and automated carto- graphy and by improvements in the statistical analysis of spatial data are then examined and topics where geographers and agricultural economists might co-operate to their mutual benefit discussed.

Introduction Both economics and geography are, by definition, concerned with the nature of agricultural activity, the economist because it is wealth-creating and the geographer because so much of the earth's surface is devoted to it: but, while no geographer interested in rural areas can fail to make extensive use of the work of agriculturalists and agricultural economists, as a recent review of postwar studies relevant to the geography of British agriculture has shown, there appears to be little complementary awareness of the geographer's contribution and some suspicion that any relationship between geography and agricultural economics would be parasitic rather than symbiotic.(') In part this situation can be explained simply by the great disparity in the resources available for their investigation; in Great Britain, for example, in contrast to the large number of agricultural economists employed in government, the agricultural industry and the universities, the considerable sums devoted annually to research in agricultural economics and the flood of articles and reports in which the results are published, there are relatively few professional geographers whose interests are mainly agricultural, no research institutes or funds earmarked for research in agricultural geography and no periodicals devoted exclusively to this field. There are, nonetheless, many geographical studies of agriculture in various parts of the world scattered throughout the literature of modern geography and a distinctive geographical approach, and it seems reasonable to suggest that practitioners of both disciplines might have something to learn from each other. For this reason and because there appear to be many misconceptions about what geographers do, this paper discusses the objectives and methods of geographical analysis and the achievements, limitations, and prospects of agricultural geography, with particular reference to Great Britain and to points of contact with agricultural economics.

The nature of geography It is obvious from daily experience that the earth's surface is not homogeneous, although the rate of change varies greatly from place to place. Understanding

I 54 J. T. COPPOCK

how and why it differs is the geographer’s principal role. It is true that etymo- logically geography implies only description of the earth but no geographer would accept so limited a definition of his subject. This is not to underestimate the formidable task which such description poses, for it is, in fact, very difficult to write good descriptions which are both accurate and readable; data are often lacking, there is no necessary logical order, as in narrative, and there are no objective principles of selection. Description, both verbal and graphic, remains an important task for the geographer and the one for which he is best known; yet geography would retain few adherents if it were confined to description and much of its intellectual interest lies in the attempt to understand what is described.

The distinguishing characteristics of any geographical investigation are a concern with differences between areas and with the spatial arrangement of their constituent features ; location and context are thus complementary themes. By “context” is meant the specific setting, whether local, regional or global, of the features under discussion; it also embraces the idea of completeness, for the geographer’s viewpoint, like that of the historian, is essentially holistic. This, in a period of increasing specialisation, is both an attraction and also a source of weakness, for it requires some familiarity with a wide range of disciplines whose subject matter and concepts are themselves changing rapidly. It also poses difficult problems, familiar enough to the agriculturalist and the general medical practitioner, of how the relevant parts of related disciplines may best be taught. Yet the charge of superficiality which such eclecticism sometimes attracts is based largely upon a misconception; the geographer does not aspire to be a polymath, but rather to study a section of the earth’s surface, in whole or in part, from a particular viewpoint instead of a class of phenomena.

Location is both relative and specific. The French geographer, Vidal de la Blache, once described geography as the science of places, but this concern with specific location does not mean that geographers are interested only, or indeed primarily, in the unique; like historians, they have tried to discern broad trends and tendencies within the apparent chaos of individual cases. For some geographers, the identification of regions, areas of similarity on the earth’s surface, has been the ultimate aim of geographical inquiry, but most geographers would now prefer to regard regionalisation as a useful procedure in the search for explanations of what is being described and a convenient way of simplifying what is highly complex. In an endeavour to improve these procedures, geographers are paying increasing attention to more precise measurement of these tendencies and to the recognition of generalised statistical surfaces to which the actual phenomena approximate and around which they vary; but the derivation of generalisation from individual data must not be overlooked, especially in the search for causes. The importance of such individual data will vary with the size of the area being investigated, which can range from a single parish to the whole world; for, to the geographer, no one scale is more meaningful than another. Different, but equally valid statements can be made at each scale, as the views from aeroplanes and satellites increasingly make plain; for the satellite picture of the British Isles is no less “real” than the more limited view from the farmhouse door.

Agricultural geography: the approach This analysis of the nature of geography suggests that ideally there should be no divisions of geography, but in practice it is ,clearly impossible for anyone to have more than a superficial acquaintance with the whole field and geographers have tended to specialise both by area and by topic. Agricultural geographers thus study the ways in which the pattern of agricultural activity varies throughout

THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGRICULTURE 155

the world. It is their aim to identify and, as far as possible, to explain these differences, to answer such questions as “Where is orchard fruit grown in the United Kingdom?’ “Why should fruit-growing occur in these localities and not in others?” and “HOW does it fit in to the complex of other activities which occupy these areas?” They are concerned not only with the present, but also with the past and especially with the antecedents of the present scene and with the stability or otherwise of patterns of agricultural activity. There is also increasing interest in the extrapolation of present trends and in the use of models to predict future distribution.

Since agriculture is primarily an economic activity, agricultural geography has been conventionally regarded as part of economic geography.(2) This does not imply that agricultural geographers are concerned only with economic considerations and, ironically, for lack of suitable data, connections with economics have never been strongly developed and there are relatively few investigations which have concentrated on economic aspects of agriculture. In many ways, links have been closer with physical geography and with other branches of human geography, notably historical geography, where many studies have been concerned with agricultural topics. An economic agricultural geography can and should be developed, but geographers in general will wish to retain an approach which does not admit any prior claims in the search for explanations. Geo- graphers value their links with agriculturalists, ecologists, historians and soil scientists no less than those with economists, and differences in field pattern, farm layout, field boundaries and the like interest geographers no less than the distribution of agricultural enterprises. (3)

In fulfilling these aims geographers have followed two complementary approaches to the study of agriculture. They have felt the need not only to analyse the occurrence of individual elements in order to understand them better, but also to integrate the results into a succession of progressively more adequate syntheses. This latter task is essentially an art and one that becomes increasingly difficult as the volume of data grows and the range of understanding increases: nevertheless, it remains an important objective.

The stimulus to research in agricultural geography has frequently been curiosity about the agricultural characteristics of some territory or about the spatial distribution of some crop or class of livestock. It may be observation of some highly-localised feature, such as the concentration of raspberry growing around Dundee, or a general impression, derived from statistics, literary sources or cumulative observations, of some regional contrast in land use or type of farming, e.g. the variations throughout Great Britain in the proportion of land under grass (Fig. 1); increasingly it is likely to be the desire to verify some hypothesis, whether this be a generalisation based on experience or a logical con- sequence of a theoretical model. Whatever the starting point, the first task is to identify more precisely what is to be investigated and this will generally imply that the phenomena must be mapped as accurately as available data and resources will allow and as the scale and purpose of the investigation warrant. Only when this has been done can the range of variations in different parts of the area and the degree of localisation be accurately determined.

The fact that the phenomena being investigated are often so much larger than what can be seen at any one time by an observer gives the map and, to a lesser but increasing extent, air photographs a prominent place in geographical methodology. For, while the study of maps is not geography and geographers claim no monopoly of them, the map is for the geographer what the microscope is for the biologist and the telescope for the astronomer, a tool whereby objects can be studied at very different scales from that of direct human perception. The map also plays a prominent part in analysis, enabling different distributions

156 J. T. COPPOCK

to be compared, permitting relative location to be studied, revealing unsuspected relationships between widely separated areas and allowing those which are known or suspected to be precisely stated. Only for very small areas or for a

Fig. 1. The localisation of agricultural production.

Sources: Agricultural Departments,

THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGRICULTURE I57 very limited number of statistical data is it possible to visualise their spatial characteristics at all accurately without the aid of maps, air photographs or other forms of graphic display.

Once phenomena have been mapped, the question “Why there?” arises. Because data vary so much in degree of generalisation and in accuracy and because the causes are so numerous and so inter-related, rigorous analysis has not been thought possible in the past and the explanations offered have been based on intuitive judgment. The maps themselves, by revealing relationships, similarities and differences, will suggest some of the reasons, as will the require- ments of the crop or class of livestock. Since many agricultural activities are closely linked with physical conditions, certain of these factors are likely to be physical parameters such as length of the growing season, the distribution of rainfall in summer or variations in soil texture. The search for possible causes will not, of course, be confined to such factors, although the early training in geology and other field sciences of many first-generation geographers and the lack or poverty of socio-economic data have tended to give much geographical inquiry a bias in favour of physical relationships; thus, field data on crop distribution can be accurately compared with soil type, aspect or field shape, but not with, say, labour inputs. The size and layout of farms and fields, conditions of land tenure, availability of labour and other inputs and location in respect of markets must also be considered where they seem appropriate. Past distributions often repay study, both because the degree of stability of land use and farming type is likely to be a fruitful source of insight and also because many agricultural features in a long-settled country like Great Britain can be fully understood only in the light of their origins.

Assessing the importance of these different factors is a major difficulty. In the past a key consideration has been similarity of distribution, which has been determined largely by visual comparison (and occasionally measurement) of maps, either by juxtaposing them, or by means of transparent overlays. In- creasing use is now being made of statistical measures of association, such as the calculation of regression lines and multiple correlation analysis; but the application of these procedures to spatial data is not properly understood and there is some doubt about the appropriateness of such methods devised for quite different purposes. A further difficulty in the way of more precise analysis is that data exist at different degrees of generalisation and in many different units of measurement; the situation would certainly be improved if all data could be expressed in terms of common areas and, where possible, common units. For the present there are some indications that inspection may provide equally valid, if not better, results and, in any case, such statistical or visual comparisons provide evidence only of correspondence and not of causation, which can be established, if at all, only by further inquiry.

Agricultural geography: the product

This sequence has not aIways been followed in its entirety, in part because the number of geographers has been small, the available resources meagre and the data often unsatisfactory, and many studies have not advanced far beyond the descriptive phase. Furthermore, agricultural geography sensu strict0 is still a young subject and the first text book in English to bear this title appeared only in 1966.(4) Much geographical writing about agriculture is thus embedded in general regional geographies.

Early work in agricultural geography was largely confined to analyses of the production of agricultural commodities throughout the world, as in G. C. Chisholm’s Hondbook of Coiniiiercid Geography and in The Geography of the

158 J. T. COPPOCK

World's Agriculture by V. C . Finch and 0. E. Baker.(5) Attempts were also made to describe the major agricultural regions of the world, particularly in a sequence of articles in Economic Geography in the 1920s and 1930s. Such broad surveys of individual commodities and of the major types of farming are still characteristic of many elementary texts in economic geography and the perspective they provide remains an important part of the mental equipment of an agricultural geographer; but they have largely ceased to be the subjects of active research, for the flood of data has grown to such dimensions that world-wide and continental surveys are generally beyond the capacity of individual geographers in universities. In a sense they have been made less necessary by the numerous reports of organisations such as F.A.O. and O.E.C.D., which have also been responsible for a great increase in the amount of statistical information available; but these bodies are concerned only incidentally with the geography of agricultural production and there remains a need, now largely unmet, for continuing geographical evaluation and interpretation of these data.

In place of these global surveys, geographers have devoted their attention increasingly to more detailed studies of particular enterprises and farming systems in individual countries; these inquiries have ranged widely in scale and in topic and have been based upon both fieldwork and the analysis of data collected by others. In Great Britain a major stimulus to work in agricultural geography was the Land Utilisation Survey, organised in the 1930s by the late Sir Dudley Stamp. This was not an agricultural survey as such, although it had a marked rural bias; its purpose was to provide a record of the use of every parcel of land and its value to agricultural geography was threefold. Through its published maps at scales of 1" and 10" to the mile, the Land Utilisation Survey made both geographers and non-geographers more vividly aware of some of the varied patterns of agricultural activity throughout Great Britain and of the rapidity with which these changed from place to place. Secondly, it directly stimulated the study of agricultural geography through the need to prepare county memoirs on the work of the Survey. Lastly, it provided, for the first time, independent data on rural land use and brought to light anomalies in official records.

It is true that the Survey itself provided only limited data on four broad categories of agricultural land, viz. arable land, orchards, grassland and rough moor and heath, but the authors of individual memoirs were encouraged to undertake further investigations and drew heavily on both additional fieldwork and other sources of data, especially the parish summaries of the annual agricultural returns. While some memoirs are little more than descriptive commentaries on the distribution of the different categories recorded on the printed maps, many include valuable historical sections, generally covering changes in the agricultural geography since the 187Os, and others, like K. M. Buchanan's Worcestershire, contains much original work.(6) These memoirs constitute the largest single body of writing about the agricultural geography of Great Britain since the Board of Agriculture Reports appeared around the begin- ning of the nineteenth century. Much of the information they contain was summarised by Sir Dudley Stamp in his account of the survey, The Land of Britain: irs Use and Misuse, which is still the most comprehensive view of the agricultural geography of Great Britain currently available.") A second land use survey was begun in 1960 under the direction of Miss Alice Coleman; broadly the same categories are employed, but this information is recorded in greater detail. Most of England and Wales and about half of lowland Scotland have now been mapped, more than 75 maps at a scale of 28" to one mile have been published and a new series of memoirs will appear in due course.(8)

These and other land-use studies in the Chilterns, Hampshire, Lancashire,


Leicestershire and elsewhere have provided the raw material for many investigations in agricultural geography. Some have been concerned with topics such as the height of the moorland edge, the length of the growing season or the effects of aspect which involved the relationships between physical parameters and land uses and where a knowledge of exact location is essential; thus J. A. Taylor, by mapping the crops grown in southwest Lancashire, has analysed the close relationship between cropping and parent material and A. J. Stevens has attempted the difficult task of correlating erosion surfaces and land uses in north Hampshire.(s) The geographer’s approach has been especially appropriate in the study of agricultural land classification ; the Land Utilisation Survey did much of the pioneer work in the preparation of the first Land Classification Map of Great Britain and geographers have also played a prominent part in attempts to devise improved methods of land cIassification.(l0)

Detailed mapping of agricultural land use has also been valuable in studies of agricultural change, especially those involving linear features like the margin of cultivation or areas where complex and sometimes contrary changes are taking place simultaneously, as with the grubbing up of old orchards and the planting of new in the Evesham district. N. Hilton’s study of land-use changes in the Land’s End peninsula is a good example of an investigation which would have been impossible without data which could be precisely located.(”)

The major limitation of data on agricultural land use. whether obtained by observation in the field, by the interpretation of air photographs or, in the case of historical studies, from documentary sources, is that they can provide only limited data on cropping and no information on livestock. Most studies have therefore been based upon the parish, county or, when available, district summaries of the 4th June returns. Careful investigation of the origin and development of these returns has brought to light several characteristics which had not previously been appreciated, notably the lack of any necessary correspondence between an administrative area and the land to which the summary relates and the impropriety of comparing actual acreages and numbers of livestock recorded in parish and, to a lesser extent, county summaries over any long period of time.(12) This latter consideration is of special importance because most studies employing these data have been concerned with agricultural changes, especially those which occurred between the 1870s and the 1930s and between the 1930s and the period following the Second World War.

Since there are some 13,000 parishes in Great Britain, many of which have experienced boundary changes, it has not been possible to use the parish for studies of changes throughout the whole country. Since district summaries are available only for a few years, changes in the distribution of tillage crops, dairy cattle and sheep have therefore been investigated at the county level, although counties, varying in size from Clackmannan (55 sq. miles) to Inverness (4,211 sq. miles), are very heterogeneous and unsatisfactory statistical units.(13) Nonetheless, the scale of these changes has often been sufficiently large for major regional contrasts to emerge and Figure 1, illustrating the increasing polarisation of British agriculture between a pastoral west and an arable east, provides an example of how misleading national averages can be. Parish summaries have been used mainly in the study of counties or groups of counties, as in E. S. Simpson’s analysis of the Cheshire Grass-Dairying Region(14) ; provided they are handled with care, these too can throw a valuable light on major differences and broad trends within counties.

Despite their limitations, the summaries of the agricultural returns thus represent a vast store of information, only a small part of which has so far been used by either geographers or agricultural economists. One example of the range of possibilities they provide is given by an agricultural atlas of England

160 J. T. COPPOCK

and Wales in which data for 1958 for some 350 National Agricultural Advisory Service districts have been used to show the spatial relationships of a wide range of agricultural phenomena.(15) This atlas was intended to do no more than present the statistical data in ways in which their geographical attributes could be readily appreciated and to provide some preliminary explanations; it is a repository of unanswered and challenging questions rather than a definitive account of the agricultural geography of England and Wales.

The agricultural census is not, of course, the only statistical source which can be used in the study of agricultural changes, although it is the most readily available, Other possibilities are illustrated by F. A. Barnes's illuminating study of the development of milk production in England and Wales since the 1860s and by D. C. D. Pocock's investigation of changes in hop growing,(l8) and the sources have recently been the subject of a review article by D. B. Grigg.(")

Perhaps the most significant achievements in recent years have come from attempts to advance beyond the study of individual crops and classes of livestock to a measure of their competitive power. In the absence of suitable economic data, physical data have been used for this purpose and poineer work by J. C. Weaver in the Middle West has been adapted to British conditions employing acreage as the basis for crops, livestock units for comparisons of livestock and standard man-days for agricultural enterprises.(1B) By these means it has become possible to identify areas with similar cropping or livestock enterprises as a basis for further inquiry and to measure regional differences in intensity of stocking and of agricultural use of 1and.(19) This approach has obvious limitations, but it represents a considerable improvement on the highly subjective methods of regionalisation previously employed,

Acreage is not always a very satisfactory criterion for measuringthe importance of individual crops, but yield data are available only for counties and for the major crops and are not thought to be very reliable; indeed, the publication of Scottish county figures has recently been discontinued. Attempts to examine regional differences by mapping county estimates of yields and changes of yields must therefore be treated with caution, but the use of graded shadings minimises the effects of these deficiencies and provides some evidence that differences in yield are increasing rather than diminishing (Fig. 2).

None of these investigations is strictly a study in economic geography, for they are largely innocent of any data on costs or returns. Geographers are no less aware of this deficiency than agricultural economists, but are handicapped by lack of usable data. At present, it is not possible to say with any certainty how costs and returns vary and comparative advantage can only be inferred from the regional predominance of individual. enterprises and from their coincidence with various physical parameters. Yet the few data which can be analysed spatially suggest that there are regional differences which merit more attention than they have received. E. Howell's map of agricultural land values in Shropshire, and maps of average rent levels by parishes and counties, using both sample data and total enumerations, are a case in point (Fig. 2) and D. B. Grigg has made effective use of average county rents in his study of agricultural change in England.(20) Many factors are involved in explaining these differences but the county map of average cost per ton of lime delivered at farms shows a sufficiently large range of values to suggest that the influence of location has been too readily discounted.

No agricultural geographer contemplating achievements in his field of study could feel satisfied with the results; pegs have been marked out, a great deal of preparatory spade work done and a few foundations laid, but there is no sign of the imposing edifice he would like to construct. The two major obstacles to


Fig. 2. County variations in inputs and outputs.

Sources: Agricultural Departments.

progress have been the nature of the data available and the difficulty of handling large quantities of statistics. Since only small areas can be investigated at first hand, geographers must frequently use data collected by others, often for quite

162 I. T. COPPOCK

different purposes and with serious deficiencies in respect of the very characteristic, accurate location, which is of such importance to them. Neither sampling, with its loss of significant detail, nor teamwork, with its inveitable lowering of standards, offer any wholly satisfactory alternatives at present, although they will often have to be used in default of data from other sources. It has rarely been possible to obtain information about individual farms and most data have been aggregated by administrative area without any indication of the range of variation within them; even the data collected in 194143 for the National Farm Survey, the only source of information about farm layout, is now inacces- sible in the Public Record Office. It is interesting to reflect that in most European countries cadastral records are available for public inspection and that even in Communist Hungary a much greater wealth of economic data is available to students of agricultural geography than in capitalist Britain.cZ1) It is also not without significance that many of the most interesting developments in agricultural geography have been made in Sweden, where not only the boundaries of individual holdings, but also the size of individual incomes can be ascertained.

Agricultural geography: future prospects What agricultural geographers have done has thus been severely limited by the available data and by their ability to handle them and is not necessarily a true indication of what they would have liked to do; but, while to some extent geographers must always remain the prisoners of data collected by others if they wish to study large areas, current technological developments offer exciting prospects of bringing aim and achievement into better balance. Not only has the electronic digital computer made possible the computation and manipu- lation of large quantities of statistical data in any degree of detail which the raw material will allow, but advances in automated mapping now permit maps embodying the result of these calculations, each of which would have taken a skilled geographer hours to compile, to be computed and produced by line printer in times measured in seconds, and cathode-ray tube display and xero- graphy offer prospects of even faster and more accurate mapping (Fig. 3). It is thus increasingly possible for the early stages of an investigation to be completed rapidly and for many alternative relationships to be compared.

Although in retrospect it is surprising what geographers have been able to do with desk calculator and slide rule, advances in computer technology now allow analyses to be made which formerly could not be contemplated because they were so laborious and time-consuming, as in the computation of regional differences in standard man-days per acre. Now that it is becoming possible to store maps in digital form, they can, in effect, be overlaid in the computer and the degree of correspondence between, say, crop distribution and average summer rainfall accurately measured and new maps, e.g. of residuals from regressions, generated. It is true that programs now must first be written and data punched on card or tape; but suitable programs exist for many of the procedures which geographers wish to use and others are being developed, while an increasing range of official data can now be supplied in machine-readable form.

If the geographer can convince the custodians of official data that no breach of confidence would be involved, the electronic computer also offers him the prospect of obtaining existing data in a more satisfactory form. If machine- readable data on individual holdings could be coded by national grid references, they could be recombined in ways which would be much more suitable for geographical analysis and yet would not involve disclosure of confidential details. Such a procedure is already being contemplated for the population

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164 f. T. COPPOCK

could similarly be recombined; it could also be compared with the agricultural census data for individual holdings and the results aggregated by parishes or districts to provide a more effective measure of both the distribution and the effects of subsidy payments. For example, it should be possible to discover quite quickly whether a change in policy, such as the abolition of ploughing grants, had produced different responses from farmers in different parts of the country and whether any observed differences were related to type of farming, site conditions or any other parameter for which data were available.

Developments in aerial photography are also likely to lead to improvements in both the quality and quantity of data, particularly in respect of agricultural land use. There have been considerable advances in photographic technology, particularly since the Second World War, and if proposals for regular re- surveys, preferably coinciding with the quinquennial population censuses, are adopted, the resulting high-definition photographs would be a valuable source of additional information on, say, the effects of land improvement schemes, the scale of agricultural land losses or the extent of field enlargement. Developments in satellite technology are also thought likely to yield an immense flood of data on land use at frequent intervals and may well lead to some reconsideration of the role and character of present agricultural censuses. If it is to be understood and used by agricultural policy makers, all this material will have to be mapped and analysed.

Advances will not be restricted to technological developments, for these will lead to considerable changes in priorities among the topics investigated by agricultural geographers, especially since routine spatial analyses of census data will become much easier and might well be undertaken by the statistical divisions of the agricultural departments as a desirable complement to their normal statistical tabulations. Greater emphasis is likely to be placed on changes over time, for geographers are well aware of the limitations of the static view which lack of resources has imposed upon them in so many of their studies; thus it will be possible to identify regional differences in the rate and scale of change and to extrapolate past trends into the future. Largely for the same reasons geographers have also paid too little attention to the invisible connections which link parcels of land through common ownership or occupation and which are often expressed by movements of livestock, crops, labour and machinery. These topics, which are admirably suited to geographical analysis, are already attracting attention, as are the complementary flows which link farms in different parts of the country or farm and market (Fig. 4), and there appears to be a wealth of data which veterinary departments, marketing boards, local authorities and other bodies possess on such movements which they might be persuaded to release.

Greater attention is also likely to be given to the construction and testing of theoretical models, especially those concerned with the location of agricultural enterprises. In urban and industrial geography it has proved profitable to consider ideal situations in which direction and distance are the sole variables. In agriculture, the large number of units, the close dependence on soil and climate, the varying degrees of economic motivation and the uncertain location of much data have made such an abstract approach less satisfactory and the gap between a theoretical study like E. S . Dunn’s Location of Agricultural Production and reality remains formidably large.(22) In a general way, M. Chisholm has shown the importance of such theoretical ideas at both the local and world scales and rigorous attempts to apply location theory to actual situations are now needed.(23) Agricultural studies by British geographers have tended to be empirical and D. W. Harvey’s interesting study of changes in Kentish hop- growing remains a notable More interest in model building has

THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGNCULTUKE I65

Fig. 4. Linkages between farms and between fanus and markets.

Agricultural

been shown by their American colleagues, notably in papers in the Annals of rhe Association of American Geographers and in Economic Geography. But this situation is changing and a recent volume of studies by British geographers includes a chapter on models in agricultural ge0gra~hy .c~~)

Statistical treatment of data derived from surveys and censuses will also become more sophisticated than in the past and greater use will be made of

166 J . T. COPYOCK

sampling techniques, relatively neglected except by J. W. Birch in his study of types of farming in the Isle of Man.(2e) Such developments are foreshadowed by P. Haggett’s use of trend surface analysis in land-use studies in southeast Brazil and by J. Henshall’s use of factor analysis in agricultural investigations in Barbados, both of which employed sample data.(27)

Agricultural geography and agricultural economics Much of both the subject matter and the raw material of agricultural economics and agricultural geography overlap considerably, but there are clearly differences of approach, especially in Great Britain, as is shown in a comparison of Regional Types of British Farming(2a) with the appropriate chapters of An Economic Geography of Great B r i t i a t ~ ( ~ ~ ) or of the respective attitudes of agricultural economists and geographers towards the mapping of types of farming; for what is central to the interests of agricultural geographers is often marginal to that of agricultural economists and vice versa, While it is probably true to say that differences between what most geographers and most economists do are not much greater than the range of viewpoints to be found among agricultural economists or agricultural geographers, their respective trainings do encourage them to make different assumptions and to practise different skills, a situation which finds its most obvious expression in their respective use of maps, not only as a means of communication, but more especially as analytical tools. Seen through the eyes of an agricultural economist, much of the work of agricultural geographers must seem lacking in rigour, depending as it often does on data of doubtful quality; to the geographer, it is incomprehensible that many agricultural economists can either ignore or discount without examination the immense areal variations in British agriculture. Yet in reality their approaches are complementary and there are many problems where the skills and insights of both economists and geographers could be usefully applied, whether combined in one person trained in both disciplines or through team-work, as a recent study by R. H. Best and Ruth Gasson has shown.(30) Fortunately there are encouraging signs that practitioners of both disciplines are becoming increasingly aware of the deficiencies of their respective approaches.

The greatest benefits from co-operation in academic research are likely to come from devising better tools for investigating and measuring the economic effects of differences in enviroment and in location, so that comparative advantage can be objectively demonstrated rather than assumed or inferred from what in fact happened. There seems no fundamental reason why much of the great volume of economic data currently collected by agricultural economists could not be adapted to provide more adequate measures of those differences in inputs and outputs which vary from place to place; at the very least, the data on costs and returns published in provincial and national reports of work undertaken for the Farm Management Survey could be presented in ways which would permit some crude comparisons of enterprises to be made. Even if areal differences are believed to be of little or no significance (and the range of average costs for those few inputs for which comparable data are available suggests that this is not likely to be the case), the validity of this belief should at least be established by careful enquiry.

The first aim of such co-operation would to be increase understanding, but the results might well have many practical applications. M. Chisholm has already demonstrated the value of such an approach to milk collection costs and work being done in other branches of geography on the optimisation of traffic flows might well be adapted to the study of movements of produce from farm to market.(31) It may be argued that such inquiries would have little value since tariffs, subsidies and transport policies have so modified the effects of differences

THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGRICULTURE I67

in location, but the costs of such distortions must be met by the transporting agency or marketing board and ultimately by the consumer, and attempts ought to be made to measure them; for example, it would be interesting to know the costs of canalising so much of the domestic trade in fruit and vege- tables through Covent Garden and whether these are offset by benefits arising from central marketing. Similarly, comparison of areal differences between predicted and actual distributions, like those recently made in Sweden, could be useful in identifying obstacles to change.(32) Locating and measuring such distortions and anomalies is clearly a field of enquiry where agricultural economists and geographers might co-operate.

In many ways, the most promising field for co-operation lies, not in Great Britain, but in the developing countries. The importance of non-economic motivation, the close dependence of farming on natural conditions, the difficulty of obtaining economic or statistical data of any kind, the need for field survey and the lack of base maps, although often compensated by recent aerial photographs, are circumstances to which the essentially reconnaissance nature of many geographical research techniques are well suited. Broad appraisals of the kind undertaken by N. Hilton in Northeast Brazil and in Libya are examples of investigations in which a training in both agricultural economics and agricultural geography has seemed very appropriate. Conclusion The value of the geographical approach to agriculture lies as much in the questions it poses as in its methods and results, for these questions, while seemingly naive, are both fundamental and very difficult to answer satisfactorily. “Why was the pattern of dairy farming in Great Britain so different in 1840, 1920, 1950 and 1967 and how ‘right’ in their time were each of these?” Geographers may not always be well equipped to answer the questions they ask and there is clearly great scope for improving the training they receive; but at least they make the attempt. If the answers to these and other questions are known to agricultural economists, they are not publicly known; if there are satisfactory answers to the questions “Where?” and “Why there?” they do not appear in print. Geographers will certainly be able to provide more satisfying explanations if they can enlist the co-operation of agricultural economists and agriculturalists; conversely, agricultural policies which agricultural economists help to shape are likely to be more appropriate if more attention is paid to the marked regional differences in British farming.(33)

The plea might be less necessary in, say, an African or an American context, for the appropriateness of a geographical approach is much more readily apparent and accepted on their broad acres than in the narrow confines of Great Britain. Geographers find much of interest in the work of agricultural economists such as Black and Heady and much of what has absorbed the ener- gies of academic geographers in Great Britain has been undertaken as a matter of course by geographers in the United States Department of Agriculture. Yet the pressures on Great Britain’s land resources are such that the optimal use of land which continues to be farmed will be quite as important an objective as the wise choice of land for alienation to new and expanding uses and one with whose identification both geographers and agricultural economists can help.(34) It is a good augury for such future co-operation that agricultural economists should be contributing to publications of the World Land Use Survey, that a world agricultural atlas, sponsored by agricultural economists and located in a Centre for Agricultural Geography, should include both geographers and agricultural economists among its contributors, and that the author of the monographs on the Birtish Isles should be a geographer and his editor an agricultural economist.(35)

168 J. T. COPPOCK

References 1. Coppock, J. T. “Postwar studies in the geography of British agriculture”. Geogr. Rev.,

54 (3), 1964. Summaries of later studies will be found in Geographical Abstracts, Series C. Economic Geography.

2. Buchanan, R. 0. “Some reflections on agricultural geography”. Geogruphy, 44, 1959. 3 . Coppock, J. T. “Farms and fields in the Chilterns”. Erdkiirrde, 14, 1960. 4. Symons, L. Agricultural Geography. London, 1966. 5. Chisolm, G. G. Handbook of Commercial Geography. London, 1889.

Fmch, V. C. and Baker, 0. E. Geography of the World’s Agriculture. Washington, 1917. 6. Buchanan, K. M. Worcestershire. Part 68. The Land of Britain. London, 1944. 7. Stamp, L. D. The Land of Britain; its Use and Misuse. London. 1948. 8. Coleman, A. “The second Land Use Survey; progress and Prospect”. Geogr. Jourrr., 127,

1961. 9. Taylor, J. A. “The relation of crop distributions to the drift pattern in south-west Lan-

cashire”. Inst. of British Geogrs. Publ. No. 18, 1952. Stevens, A. J. “Surfaces, soils and land use in north-east Hampshire”. Insf. of British

Geogrs. Publ. No. 26. 1959. 10. Hilton, N. “A new approach to agricultural land classification for planning purposes”.

The Classification of Agricultural Land in Britain. Tech. Rept. No. 8, Agricultural Land Service, London, 1962.

11. Hilton, N. “The Lands End Peninsula; the influence of history on agriculture”, Gcogr. Journ., 119, 1953.

12. Coppock, J. T. “The parish as a geographicaljstatistical unit”. Todschr. voor Eco~r. en Sociale Geografe, 51, 1960.

13. Coppock, J. T. “The changing arable in England and Wales 1870-1956”. Tijdschr. voor Econ. en Sociale Geografe, 50, 1959.

Simpson, E. S. “Milk production in England and Wales: a study of the influence of collective marketing”. Geogr. Rev., 49, 1959.

Hart, J. F. “The changing distribution of sheep in Britain”. Ecoii. Geogr., 32, 1956. 14. Simpson, E. S. “The Cheshire grass-dairying region”. Insf. of British Geogrs. Pitb/.No.

15. Coppock, J. T. An Agricultural Atlas of England and Wales. London, 1964. 16. Barnes. F. A. “The evolution of the salient patterns of milk production and distribution

Pocock, D. C. D. “England‘s diminished hop acreage”. Geography, 44, 1959. 17. Grigg, D. B. “The changing agricultural geography of England: a commentary on the

sources available for the reconstruction of the agricultural geography of England 1750-1850”. Inst. of British Geogrs. Publ. No. 41, 1967.

23, 1957.

in England and Wales”. Inst. of British Geogrs. Publ. No. 25, 1958.

18. Weaver, J. C. “Crop-combination regions in the Middle West”, Geogr. Rev., 44, 1954. 19. Coppock, J. T. “Crop, livestock and enterprise combinations in England and Wales”.

20. Howell, E. J. Shropshire. The Land of Britain, Part 66. London, 1941. Econ. Geogr., 40, 1964.

Grigg, D. B. “An index of regional change in English farming”. Insr. of British Geogr. Publ. No. 36, 1965.

21. Sarfalvi, B. (Ed.). Geographical Types of Hungarian Agriculture. Hungarian Academy of

22. Dunn, E. S. The Location of Agricultural Production. Gainesville, 1954. 23. Chisholm, M. Rural Settlement and Land Use. London, 1962. 24. Harvey, D. W. “Locational changes in the Kentish hop industry and the analysis of

25. Chorley, R. J. and Haggett P. (Eds.). Models in Geography. London, 1967. 26. Birch, J. W. “Observations on the delimitations of farming-type regions, with special

reference to the Isle of Man”. Inst. of British Geogr. Publ. No. 20,1954.

Sciences, Budapest, 1966.

land-use patterns”. Inst. of British Geogrs. Publ. No. 33, 1963.

DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY J. T. COPPOCK

References-conf hued 27. Haggett, P. “Regional and local components in the distribution of forested areas in

Henshall, J. D. “The demographic factor in the structure of agriculture in Barbados”.

28. Maxton, J. P. (Ed.). Regional Types of British Agriculture. London, 1936. 29. Smith, W. An Economic Geography of Great Britain. London, 1949.

30. Best, R. H. and Gasson, R. The Changing Location of Intensive Crops. Rept. No. 6..

31. Chisholm, M. J. “Regional variations in road transport costs”. Farm Econornisf, 8 (1 1-13),

32. Woipert, J. “The decision process in its spatial context”. Annals of fhe Association of

33. Scottish Milk Marketing Board. The Changing Structure of Scottish Milk Production.

34. Best, R. H. and Coppock, J. T. The Changing Use of Land in Britain. London, 1962. 35. Vanzetti, C. World Atlas of Agriculture. University of Verona.

169

south-east Brazil”. Geogr. Journ., 130, 1964.

Inst. of Brifish Geogrs. Publ. No. 38, 1966.

Studies in Rural Land Use. Wye College, 1966.

1957.

American Geographers, 54, 1964.

Glasgow, 1965.

DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY PROFESSOR J. T. COPPOCK

I cannot resist the temptation to be the first, and I hope perhaps the only one to quote the clerihew which you all know so well, “The art of geography is different from that of biography, geography is about maps, biography is about chaps.” Because it seems that this is extremely pertinent to what Professor Coppock has said. I for one would like to draw him out a little later on to tell us perhaps something of what would result from the co-operation between the historians and geographers and agricultural economists, because I fancy a good deal of the pattern of land use is due to the customs which farmers take with them. The Welshmen who have moved into the midlands took their dairying with them, the farmers from the Holland Division of Lincolnshire moving outwards took their tillage with them and so forth.

DR. C. 1. C. BOSANQUET

PROFESSOR D. K . BRITTON

I am sure that I speak for many members of the Society, present and absent, in saying that before Professor Coppock came here we were greatly indebted to him for a great deal of work that he has put in over the years. This evening Professor Coppock has increased our debt by a further elaboration, particularly on the philosophy of his work as distinct from its content.

Personally I don’t think it is worth spending a lot of time on defining what an agricultural geographer is. The fact is that many of us find the results of such work most useful, and this goes far enough for my present purpose.

My first comment is that not all of the investigational work that we have undertaken in university departments of agricultural economics has been entirely of our own choosing; and as Professor Coppock has pointed out, the residual time left for the research which we would most like to do tends to dwindle. Secondly, I would say that although we may not have published a great deal of analytical work on the question why is this agricultural activity located here and not there, one would find in studying many of the writings of agricultural economists in this country that they reflect an awareness of the importance of that question. We have, I hope, now escaped from the criticism that we treat British agriculture as homogeneous. We are very well aware of its heterogeneous nature and of the fact that solutions to a problem which fit well in one area will not fit well in another. But I also think we have sometimes been put off by the huge amount of data-handling involved in analysing local variations. I think it is most exciting, and most comforting in a way, that he tells us that the computer may well take a lot of this burden from us. We have a hundred years of county statistics, we have nearly as many years of parish statistics, but what has daunted many people from squeezing the message out of the county and parish figures has been the sheer volume of arithmetical work, and we have tended to fall back upon studies of narrower scope. I hope that the computer may prove to be a key to unlock some of this data which has been lying unused.

I would agree with Professor Coppock’s statement that a proper use of spatial data is to help explain causes and not simply to describe patterns. There have been interesting attempts by agricultural economists and agricultural statisticians to look at specific trends or movements in British agriculture which have begun in certain areas and moved later into other areas, sweeping

I70 DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY J. T. COPPOCK

like a kind of tide across the country. For example, the substitution of tractors for horses has been shown to have begun rather markedly in the south-east corner of England and specifically in Kent. For several years Kent had the highest tractor density per hundred acres of any county and then gradually the circles spread northwards and westwards from the Greater London area. No very satisfactory explanation of that pattern of adoption has been found-at least as far as I know-but the pattern has been recognised to exist and we do not speak of the mechanisation of British agriculture as though it happened uniformly. Similarly with the changing size structure of British agriculture, we know that holdings are getting larger, we know that this is almost a universal characteristic, but we certainly have recognised that it goes forward at very different speeds in different parts of the country. With innovations generally, I think agricultural economists have realised that their adoption is to be explained not simply by reference to the charateristics of the farmers concerned, but also that the geographical patterns of adoption can help to explain the process.

Looking at government policy, 1 think that one might say that at last this awareness of the heterogeneous nature of agriculture seems to be impinging upon policy statements. I think that if we read the White Papers on policy and on the Price Review for the last few years we can detect a more discriminating approach between types of farming and, implicitly, an acknow- ledgement that certain parts of the country may require special policy provisions. Of course, i i i l l sheep and hill cattle subsidies have been evidence of such recognition for a long time. But I think we can detect a certain strengthening in the desire of the government to find out where the shoe pinches and to consider where the provision of subsidies is most defensible.

1 think another reason why we have been hesitant in the ways Professor Coppock has indicated is that we are not convinced that the geographical explanation of inter-farm differences is very strong. We still feel that the managerial differences explain differences in levels of performance even more than the geographical differences. For example, if you were to compare milk costs in one region of the country with another you would still find much more variation between farms within the region than you would between the regions, and therefore we rather suspect that the inter-regional differences are not of such strong significance compared with other factors which we know affect profitability such as managerial level, experience, exposure to innovations, to extension work and so on. Maybe some of these inter-regional differences are in any case shrinking as time goes by because farmers have in their hands more and more means of over- coming climatic and other differences. I would be very interested if Professor Coppock would care to give his opinion as to whether climate and topography are likely to exert a smaller influence on farming patterns and farming performance as time goes on.

Professor Coppock suggests that economists are concerned particularly with the location of enterprises. I would go a little further. It is not so much that we are interested in the reasons why different enterprises are differently located; what we want to know is why different enterprises perform at different levels of efficiency or different levels of profitability in different regions. This is perhaps where most work needs to be done and Professor Coppock has indicated how interesting it would be to him as a geographer if we had detailed maps of incomes or of returns to investment and so on. We are still a very long way from that situation because of our relatively small samples which have income data or value of output data, but this also could be around the corner.

We are certainly aware of the inadequacy of the county as a unit. This has perhaps been another brake on our economic-geographic studies and it is very unsatisfactory to draw maps of differences in rate of change, or in density, of some characteristic using the county as a unit, for we know very well that within a county very diverse trends may be going on.

Finally may I reiterate our thanks to Professor Coppock for providing us with such a stimu- lating paper.

MR. GROGAN I would like to ask, not altogether flippantly, what manifestations of nature or of man's activities would not come within the definition of spatial order? In other words, what limitations do geographers put on their own discipline?

PROFESSOR J. T. COPPOCK

That opens up a whole realm of discussion which geographers waste far too much time discussing themselves and on which I hesitate to embark here. I think it is much more important to define what interests us and do it; in any case, there are so few of us that this question of limitations is rather unreal in the practical world. Just as agricultural economists have great soul searchings, so do geographers; in fact this has been an obsessional disease of geographers to concern themselves with discussions on this particular issue. There have been those of the landscape school who have used the visible world as a criterion: if some topic has a manifestation in the landscape then it is relevant. I do not accept this, although I am particularly interested myself in the anatomy of landscape, but there is also a physiology of landscape and in many ways this

DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY J. T. COPPOCK 171

interests me much more. What are the spatial links? What are the patterns of movement between areas? I have tried to show some examples here of these invisible or not readily visible chains. that connect different areas. These are connections of ownership or occupation. or they are movements of commodities between one area and another, whether inter-regional o r inter-farm. Geographers do not believe in putting up any sort of trespassers will be prosecuted notices about and they hope that others are equally eclectic. The stimulus to geographical enquiry can come from a variety of sources; generally I would have said, although I would not like to limit our interests in this way there is a visual stimulus, a naive curiosity about what one sees. There are no more geographical facts than there are historical facts; the only valid criterion is their relevance to any explanation of the spatial variation of the earth's surface.

0. J . BEILBY

I would like to add my thanks to Professor Coppock for a very interesting paper. I would just like to say that those of us who work in Edinburgh are particularly glad that we now have Professor Coppock in our midst. We look forward in particular to see the results of the work that he is doing on the Agricultural Atlas of Scotland.

I would like just to comment on two points. The first is that I would have expected Professor Coppock to put a little more emphasis on climate as an element of great importance both to agricultural economists and agricultural geographers. In studying the physical and economic differences between geographical areas climate is a very dominant influence affecting both the pattern of agriculture and its economics. This is a point that was brought home to me rather forcibly when I had the privilege recently of visiting Australia and New Zealand. Climate is obviously to some extent a limiting factor in the agriculture of Australia, e.g. the low rainfall and periodical drought in some areas. But climate is also a great economic asset t o Australian agriculture in other ways. The large amount of solar energy compared with, say, Britain clearly has a very considerable economic value in its impact on costs of production. A thing that struck me in Australia and New Zealand was the relatively small amount of investment in buildings and machinery in relation to the level of output and I think this is again linked with climate. Buildings are not as a rule necessary for the housing of stock and, because they can rely on the weather at harvest time, a relatively small amount of machinery will get through a large amount of work. I suggest that there is a very important interaction between geography and climate and the economics of agriculture.

I would also like to comment on the question of co-operation between agricultural economists and agricultural geographers. Professor Britton has already referred to this in part, but as one of those officials in government departments who may now be expected to do some of Professor Coppock's work for him, I would point out that we have in the Scottish Department of Agricul- ture shown very considerable interest in analysing our agricultural statistics to show geographical variations. The Department did pioneer work on this away back the in 1920s when my pre- decessor Mr. Senior started an analysis of the agricultural statistics by type of farm: this work has been continued and developed by one of my colleagues, Peter Scola, who incidentally is both an economist and a geographer. I hope the day may come when we can at least publish the agricultural statistics not only by counties and parishes but also by types of farms. We are also certainly willing to do everything we can to make data available to geographers provided that we can get round the question of confidentiality of the original data and also provided that it does not mean a very large amount of extra work such as the writing of special computer programs and so on. I must say however that, when it comes to data from farm accounts and enterprise costs for geographical studies, I am not so hopeful because, as Professor Britton pointed out, the small size of sample is a very limiting factor and it seems difficult to see how you can overcome this without a very great increase in the resources devoted to this sort of work SO as toget a larger sample which adequately represents smaller geographical areas. I think that the problem here is partly one of deciding the best size of area of study for purposes of geographical analysis. For instance I would have said that it was useful and important to study and compare the output, input and farm incomes in dairy farming in, say, South-west of Scotland on the one hand and Somerset or Lancashire on the other hand, but perhaps of lesser economic importance to study variations between parishes in the South-West of Scotland, interesting though these may be to some geographers. From the point of view of the practical application of the results, particularly in relation to policy questions, I think that comparisons of these rather larger geographical areas may be the best and most practical way ofstudying the economics of regional variations.

DR. B. E. CRACKNELL

It gives me personal pleasure to welcome Professor Coppock and his paper this evening. I recently worked with him on a Committee on land use data for a year or so and I learnt a great deal from him. Since then we have been in close touch and are now working very closely together on the geographical aspects of cereal farming.

172 DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY J. T. COPPOCK

May I just comment on what I think are one or two omissions in Professor Coppock’s very interesting list of work done. I was a little surprised that he had not included two very interesting types of farming maps that have been produced, one by Brian Jackson of Cambridge and Langley’s work at Newton Abbot. I notice Ihe fought shy of mentioning the discussions that were held some years ago between the Ministry and agricultural geographers on a Types of Farming map but I think he might have made a reference to the progress being made by the Ministry in classifying land value, basically on a physical method, but also in economic terms as well. I think this will be extremely valuable work and will take us quite a long way forward in terms of deciding priorities for land use.

May I just comment on this question of maps. It seems to me that geographers have sometimes been too content with a photographic still-a static picture. I feel that maps are most useful when they illustrate changes. For instance we need more maps showing the spread of cereal varieties, of diseases, of tower silos. Movements and changes of this sort are extremely interesting and I think are worth mapping. Again, could we not think in terms of mapping flows? Flows of grain, flows of market garden produce, flows of fertilisers and compound feeds, all these things move around the country. Very little work indeed has been done in trying to map flows or the techniques of mapping flows. Again I don’t think enough has been done in the use of maps to illustrate the inter-relationships of factors. There is of course the familiar “sieve map” technique that land planners have used so successfully, but surely we could use the same type of technique as well, to illustrate, for instance, the relationship between cereal varieties and the physical enviroment. Could we not show as overlays, transparencies of rainfall, hours of sunshine, days of frost, soil types, etc. andcorrelate these with cereal varieties to illustrate the relative importance of these physical factors? Again, can we not overcome this problem of the awkward shape of the unit (the farm, the parish or the county) by moving to a grid reference system? This would seem to me to be a major breakthrough. Weaver’s work, which was referred to in the paper, was made possible by the fact that he was using American-type counties in the prairies and theseconstitute a ready made grid system, each county was the same shape and size and he was able to do mapping simply by using the published county data.

Lastly, I was rather surprised that Professor Coppock referred to the lowering of standards that comes from teamwork. I may have misunderstood him, but on page 162 he used those words. It seems to me that thegeographer is really at his best when he is working with somebody else, because then he knows rather better what are the questions that are worth finding the answers to. He is not working in isolation, but he is using his special skills and techniques to help the people who have urgent questions that need answering. I always think the best example of all, not many of you may have read it, was the report “The Making of the Broads” which was a wonderful example of teamwork between an engineer, a biologist, a geologist, a geographer, an historian. Together they were able to prove that the Norfolk Broads were basically man made; they were in fact peat workings that became flooded. But it was by each man contributing his own special skills that they were able to make this great advance.

I hope that Professor Coppock, busy man as he is, will be able to be with us on many future occasions.

E. DAWSON

I do not take such a pessimistic view as Mr. Beilby about the possibility of doing something along these lines in the Economics Service. After all it is now feasible at the provincial level to obtain a random sample of about one hundred farms and this can tell one quite a lot if carefully chosen. Random sampling has become more popular in recent years and I would like Professor Coppock to say whether he agrees that this should provide us with opportunities to give our work a geographical slant. I suspect that up to now geographical considerations have not entered into the choice of sample. To be of use for this purpose the figures must be tied to a well defined area, which means that the “domains of study” need to be carefully looked at prior to sampling. A good many samples are not on a random basis and this prompts me to ask whether, by the employment of non-parametric statistics, they could be made of use to the geographer.

PROFESSOR G. P. WIBBERLEY

Let me first of all put myself on the side of the angels. I have been working with teams of mixed economists, agriculturalists and geographers for about twenty years now and I am very much with Professor Britton in his comments as to why certain of our work in the past has not had a very strong geographical slant to it and why this has recently improved.

But obviously there is something wrong. The whole pattern of co-operation between geographers and economists generally has been quite poor and there is no point in us deciding here tonight that if we just say so that this is all going to change and that we are going to be very co-operative in the future. First of all, many professional persons in economics and in geography have not used the same language for quite a long time. Older geographers in this country have had very little time or use for economic reasoning and many leaders in economic thinking have

DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY J. T. COPPOCK 173 had little understanding of geographical concepts. This divergence took place even in academic institutions where geographers and the economists were spatially united. From time to time one has come across a very naive approach on the part of geographers to technical considerations, particularly in agricultural, and as well as to economic concepts.

This naivety (and I noticed that Professor Coppock also used this word) is of course an in- herent danger in the subject of geography as it arises out of a descriptive type of spatial study. Technical knowledge is almost bound to be naive on some parts of such a wide canvas. Some- times, also, the geographer does not have a strong and viable hypothesis in his research approach. Some appear to keep slavishly to the idea that their job is merely to present what exists rather than to test a particular hypothesis quite rigorously.

Professor Coppock has done much to rectify this position-as a member of the modern and younger school of geographers. There is now a very strong link occurring between younger economists and younger geographers, particularlyin regional scienceand locational economics.Those of us who are now working with some of the new graduates who are coming out of the geography departments of today find that they are strong in their understanding of economics, have this extremely valuable locational sense and also are becoming well versed in quantitative methodology relating to location problems. Now this is all going to be very much better in the future than it was in the past. But Professor Coppock cannot really justify the approach that his main function is to describe what exists. I doubt very much whether this is suitable for the problems of the developing countries. I would agree with him that in many parts of Africa some of the earlier work that needs to be done are good agricultural geographic studies. They should not, however, stop at this point. I think you will find that both in the technical and in the economic fields the work developed is not of a geographical nature. Why is it, for example, that in some of the new universities that are being set up in the developing countries, and even in Africa where we in British universities have a strong interest, the establishment of Chairs in Geography have been very low on the priority list and there have been a few universities where Chairs in Geography have not been established? In other words, it seems to have been accepted that, whereas there are certain aspects where the location of the individual firm or of an individual family are important there are many other aspects where, at least in the early stages of development, the particular location of the individual firm or family is less important than other things.

As Professor Coppock and I have worked together in harmony I hope he will accept that what I have said is designed to improve communication and co-operation between those of us in applied economics and agriculture and our colleagues in geography.

K. E . HUNT First, description well done is worth doing and Professor Coppock need not be so apologetic about geographers’ description work. If it is to be done, however, we must be prepared to do the tedious work necessary to get the definitions right.

Second, what techniques are available for displaying complex assemblies of data, particular methods which overcome the limitations of the plane surface of the map?

Third, should we establish archives in which to store any substantial bodies of data with geographical (and other) interest which may be assembled in the course of agricultural economic research ?

Fourth, a number of university departments of geography turn their students loose each summer to make regional studies. Agricultural economists would usually be prepared to help them but it would be better if thecontact could be made before the field work rather than after- as seems often to happen now.

Finally, what is the state of plans for publishing a world agricultural atlas?

PROFESSOR EDGAR THOMAS The man who has the unchallenged right to be regarded as the father of agricultural economics in Europe was also a natural agricultural geographer of a very high order indeed. I referofcourse to Arthur Young.

PROFESSOR J. T. COPPOCK

Firstly, I should like to thank Dr. Bosanquet and other members of the Agricultural Economics Society very warmly far inviting me to this meeting. I must, however, apologise for the form in which you received the paper and for the absence of the maps which will appear in the published paper; but I had very little time after receiving your invitation in which to prepare my paper. In many ways, I am sorry that I have confined myself to Great Britain, for much of the best work in agricultural zeography, such as B. H. Farmer’s study of colonisation of the dry zone in Ceylon and R. G. Ward’s analysis of farming in Fiji, has been done elsewhere; again the small-scale landscape of Great Britain and its long and varied history make for very

174 DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY J. T. COPPOCK

complex situations which do not lend themselves as readily to geographical analysis as the broad canvases of North America or Australia. But I did so because both you and I have worked primarily on British topics.

I regret to say that Dr. Bosanquet’s clerihew, though much quoted, is not true; maps are generaily about some aspect of the geography of an area and geographers make extensive use of them, but geography is not about maps. I do, however, agree that the role of migrant farmers is very important in agricultural change and that the past is frequently a key to the present. There is considerable common interest in the antecedents of present agriculture among agricultural economists, geographers and historians, as examination of these pages of the Agricultural Histur.v Review will show, and I hope this will be. strengthened by work we are currently pre- paring for the international inquiry into the terminology of the agricultural landscape. As professor Thomas has pointed out, Arthur Young was very much an agricultural geographer; so too were his contemporary, William Marshall, and many of the contributors to the Board of Agricultural Reports. I often wish that contemporary agricultural. writers, and still more the authors of official reports, were as informative in this respect as their 19th century counter- parts.

May I say to Professor Britton that I am very conscious.of the valuable work which has emerged from his department and am deeply appreciative of it. I do say in the introduction to my paper that geographers draw extensively on the work of agricultural economists and I did applaud the work of Peter Scola of the Department of Agriculture for Scotland in my inaugural lecture at Edinburgh on The Geographer and the Use of Land; I was interested to learn of the earlier work by Mr. Senior. Indeed, 1 would like to pay tribute to all those in the economics and statistics branches of the agricultural departments who have been so helpful to me over the years; but I hope that the Ministry of Agriculture will soon follow Scotland’s example and produce an annual companion to Scottish Agricullitrul Econoniics, which I find a mine of information.

I was glad to have Professor Britton’s assurance that agricultural economists are increasingly aware of spatial differences, but I do urge them to publish more of their analyses and thoughts on this topic. One of my private dreams is an electronic device for extracting painlessly and harmlessly the wealth of data relevant to the agricultural geography of Great Britain which is stored in the minds of agricultural advisors and agricultural economists: working in Nigeria, I found the detailed and often lengthy agricultural notebooks or descriptions of their districts prepared by some agricultural officers of the greatest value. And here I would like to link up with Mr. Hunt’s query about the need to establish some centre where the results of surveys could be deposited. I think this would be invaluable and I hope Oxford will pioneer it. In due course we shall follow the example of Canada and the Scandinavian countries and establish some computer-based land inventory; but much data will not be suitable for storage in such a form and in the meanwhile the agricultural departments might consider making the results of their censuses available at some such centre, in machine-readable form, but with appropriate confidential “locks”.

It is interesting that Professor Britton should have referred to diffusion, because there is parallel work by geographers on migration and diffusion, particularly by Swedish geographers from Lund, which has a great deal of bearing on this problem. Here is another example of the situation, all too common, where people in different fields are working on similar topics quite unknown to each other. Here again there is need for some clearing house where information of this kind would be available.

I accept the importance of inter-farm differences, although I would like to see them analysed spatially. I doubt that they are random and believe that we shall find that they range around identifiable regional trends of the kind which would obtain if standards of managements were uniform throughout. Such regional trends may themselves be valuable as norms to which we might try to upgrade standards of management. I do not know whether anything significant would come out of such analyses, but I think we ought to ask questions about the statistical distribution of inter-farm differences from locality to locality-whether it is normal and whether the spread of values is everywhere the same. These questions ought not to be dismissed out of hand, although I think many people are only too ready to do so.

Clearly, farmers are increasingly able to avoid physical controls through capital investment and the expanding acreage which is irrigated and the work being done on the in-wintering of sheep are obvious straws in the wind. But these investments represent a cost which we might perhaps avoid with a more rational location of farm types. There are also trends in the opposite direction in terms of breeding suitable varieties adapted to particular conditions and the late Sir Dudley Stamp argued that physical controls over agriculture were now more important than formerly. I do not accept this view, although the increasing regionalisation of the major enterprises can be used to support it and as measures to bring about structural changes in farming take effect, we might expect the significance of differences in physical resources to increase in relative importance.

I accept Mr. Beilby’s strictures that I did not say very much about climate and agriculture. Climate is, of course, of the greatest importance, both directly in terms of crop selection and

DISCUSSION ON PAPER BY J. T. COPPOCK 175 crop yield and indirectly through its effect on investment. But so much of the work of geographers in the past has been concerned with physical aspects that I did try to stress in my paper that this was not our only concern. Even in Britain there are considerable climatic differences, especially with quite small differences in elevation, and we are very far from understanding the role of climate in agriculture. The collection of papers recently published under the editor- ship of Mr. J. A. Taylor of the Aberystwyth Geography Department, is a useful addition to our knowledge.

I do appreciate the problems of confidentiality of records which Mr. Beilby and his colleagues face; but I still think it would be possible to use individual data as building bricks without breach of confidence. What is needed is some locational tag which is better than the county or parish and I hope that the hundred metre grid square, whose use in the 1971 population census is currently being investigated, might provide this. If this is not possible, no question of disclosure should arise if individual details were provided with only the parish name as an index of location. I believe that satisfactory correlation analyses could be performed on such data; once the analyses have been completed, the individual data could be discarded.

I did not refer to land classification at any length for the same reason that I did not discuss the role of climate. But 1 must say as a geographer that I regret that the approach to land classification of the late Norman Hilton (whose untimely death is a loss to both geography and agricultural economics), where both physical and economic considerations were taken into account, should have been discarded in favour of a purely physical approach. Similarly, 1 did not mention the work of Jackson and Langley because I was trying to focus attention on what had been done by geographers. In part 1 think Dr. Cracknell’s other criticisms will be met when he sees the published maps. I am at one with him in believing that we need flow maps and maps of change. The difficulties are partly cartographic and partly lack of data. For satisfactory maps of change I suspect we shall have to await the arrival of large cathode ray tubes on which we can display, greatly speeded up, the actual sequence of change. There is clearly a misunderstanding about my reference to teamwork. I was referring to the use of teams of less skilled investigators, like census enumerators or land-use surveyors, each of whom would cover only a part of the area in question. I did not mean co-operation as members of a multi-disciplinary team, which is wholly admirable.

I am glad to have Mr. Dawson’s comments and agree that the possibility of drawing satisfactory samples greatly facilitates geographical analysis. There is an increasing awareness that parametric statistics are not necessarily the most appropriate tool and I would draw his attention to the book by R. Chorley and P. Haggett to which 1 refer and to Haggett’s book Locatioirol Analysis iit Hitirim Geographv.

I accept Professor Wibberley’s stricture that we have not been sufficiently problem-orientated and I think this relates to the point I made earlier, that we have been over-stretched in providing the ground work of information. If, as I hope, computers make this task much easier or alternatively (and preferably) if the agricultural departments undertake routine geographical analyses, we shall be able to overcome this problem. But I think he is wrong about the place of departments of geography in African universities; all those I know were among the first departments to be founded in their respective universities and some excellent work has been done by geographers interested in agriculture, such as K. M. Buchanan, D. N. MacMaster and W. B. Morgan.

I am glad to have Mr. Hunt’s support over the question of description, which, if done well, is both valuable and difficult. The problem of showing complex relationships is in part one of striking a balance between over-simplification and the incomprehensibility of reality and this is a matter of subjective judgment. There is, however, increasing interest among geographers in the representation of statistical surfaces in three dimensions and the work of P. Haggett on trend surface analysis (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers No. 37) and of P. Gould on the interpretation of eigen values (ibid No. 42) are both relevant in this context.

I am sorry that Mr. Hunt has been troubled by students, but this is a real and widespread problem. Too much geography is book work and we are right to encourage students to go and look for themselves. Perhaps our briefing is bad, but I would advise him to turn away any student who expected to be spoon-fed; they are supposed to rely chiefly on observation and on the use of standard sources. Where they do seek the help of others I stress to them the importance of feed-back, of letting those who provide information see something of the use to which it is put. As far as the World Altas of Agriculture is concerned, I understand that the first volume on Europe will appear next spring.

One of the things which continually surprises me is the number of agricultural economists I meet who were once geographers. I do not know what conclusion I should draw from this, although many of them prefer to keep their antecedents dark. Be that as it may, I have greatly enjoyed this opportunity of informal meeting and discussion with you at your conference.

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THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGRICULTURE