Could you tell me how do the number of farms in the Ledbury area now compare with the number when you started farming? I would suggest that the number of farms now would be no more than 125% in number than they were in the 1940s. This is a poem that's gone.

Yeah, the building's been developed. Um There are a lot of farms, the homesteads and everything else has been developed for housing. Well you get a lot of them where the barns are all, you get a little conclave of 6 houses, yeah, yeah, all being converted and the farm's been taken over by the neighbour and the farms have got bigger.

I could mention from next to us at the Grange, I could, I could go rattle up farm after farm after farm which has disappeared.

But a lot of them would presumably have been small holdings or some of them would have been small holdings. No, not really.

No, they would have been big enough for a farmer and his wife to employ 3 or 4 men and um have a little community of their own. Each farm was a, a community of families, you know, really.

Um, the men came to work every. Every morning, but You housed the, you housed the men and their wives, and, and each one was a community of its own.

The farm here, A man who visits us Sunday morning, he farms out at Tarrington.

When he came there as farm manager, he said there were 17 men on the farm. Now his son farms a lot. Yeah. That'd be, that'd be an extreme example, but, but I would think.

One man now would be doing the work of 68, or 10 everywhere. because the machines got so huge and this is what's got farming in debt because the farmers can't own the machines, can they? You can't find a quarter of a million to buy a combine harvester. 100,000 for a tractor.

Where'd you find the money from? This is where contractors have come in.

I was just going to say, yeah, they don't own the machine. They, they just hire in the.