Welsh Journals

The Agricultural Landscape of Wales, Part I. The Structure of Agricultural Holdings 1964-74 J.W.AITCHISON Lecturer, Department of Geography, U.C.W. Aberystwyth (Received September 1977: in revised form January 1978) Abstract Based on data aggregated from parish summaries, this paper exam- ines patterns of absolute and relative change in the structure of agricultural holdings within the Principality. The period 1964-74 is considered, and holding sizes are measured both in areal units and in terms of levels of standard labour utilization. Introduction The present paper constitutes the first of a two-part 'inquiry into patterns of change within the Welsh farming landscape. The studies focus on the decade 1964-1974 and explore regional and temporal tendencies in holding size and type of farming. Agricultural statistics collated at the parish level by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food constitute the main information source. Whilst these statistics offer a wide-ranging and detailed insight into the character and organization of agriculture, it has to be recog- nized that they pose certain inferential problems for the geographer interested in analysing patterns of spatial variation. 1 Firstly, being aggregate in form, parish summaries are divorced from the functional reality of the farming landscape itself; a reality which can only be fully grasped by reference ta conditions prevailing at the individual farm level. It is-for this reason that the proposed studies tend to be descriptive rather than explanative in nature. Hypotheses are proffer- ed; but in general the aim is to provide directives for more detailed regional inquiry. Only by tracing trends and discontinuities within the Principality as a whole can the strength and significance of part- icular regional nuances be set in perspective. Unfortunately, this seemingly straightforward commitment is complicated by the spatial insensitivity of the parish records themselves. The aggregation of individual holding returns to create parish summaries presents-few statistical problems, but from the geog- rapher's point of view the resulting summations lose much of their meaning simply because they refer to unknown segments of territory This arises because the civil parishes to which holdings are assigned, for purposes of enumeration, are unlikely to coincide with the areas