Small is beautiful

A DEBATE at this year’s Oxford Farming Conference considered the motion that ‘the demise of the family farm has been greatly exaggerated’. After the stats and stories, the house—comprising many of the industry’s movers and shakers, of all ages—voted the motion down by 2 to 1. The family farm, they believed, was dying on its feet. However, neither the people who thought it was dying, nor the people who thought it was still flourishing, considered the death of the small family farm to be a good thing at all.

It isn’t hard to see why family farms might be in crisis. With property prices sky high and many tax advantages for people with money to invest in farmland, it has made sense for a lot of small farmers to flog their land,