How farming has changed over the last 50 years
Farming Week by Week (3)
Farming has changed hugely over the last 50 years in many respects. This change is due mainly to the advancement in technology in the last half century. New machinery has made farming less time consuming and much less laborious. For example farmers can now milk over a hundred cows twice a day. 50 years ago this would have taken so long that farmers wouldn’t have even been able to milk a hundred cows in a day. This improvement in farming has allowed farmers to expand their farms and increase their stock numbers.
Farming has also became far more productive with improvements in machinery. In 1962 on average one farmer fed 25.8 people. Now a single farmer produces enough food to fed 155 people. This was driven by the rising world population and facilitated by technology. Farmers are now far more important and at a greater risk than they were 50 years ago. Despite the increase in the demand for food and the increase in the production of food, farmers are still not seeing the profits of these increase.
Authors- Neville Bennett, Tom Donald, Will James