Influences on mobility and employment in Irish family farming

This is a study of some of the economic and demographic determinants of the decline in employment among farmer and farmers' relatives between 1951 and 1961 in the Republic of Ireland. Net migration and employment decline have been studied separately for each of these employment categories, and multiple regression techniques applied to test a model of the dynamics of the family-farm labour force. The principal findings reported are: (i) there is some responsiveness to expected family-farm income in the migration decisions of both employment categories, but this factor does not account for much of the inter-county variation in migration in either category ; (ii) a major source of variation in employment decline among farmers is the number of farmers' deaths expected over the period, and (iii) the increase in the number of farmers' relatives expected in the absence of migration does not contribute significantly to the explanation of employment decline, but does account for much of the variation in the level of net migration, among this employment category. These findings are, in general, confirmed when the model is tested on age-specific data. In addition to illumination the reasons for the changes that have occurred in the family-farm labour force between 1951-61, it is believed that the model presented here can be readily applied to help forecast the future behaviour of this labour force.