Agriculture. This was done mainly for advisory purposes, and for the most part included only a small number of farms in each advisory province. Since 1936 a more exhaustive enquiry into the costs of milk production was carried out in each of the eleven advisory provinces in agreement with the Ministry of Agriculture. This was an extremely expensive investigation and in pre-war years neither money nor staff was available to enquire into the costs of production of other commodities on anything like the same scale.