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exceed elevenpence a gallon for contract milk, and went as low as sixpence farthing to farmers who cannot help themselves; but the price to the consuming public was never less than 2s. Where the farmer has to pay considerable charges for carriage, it is obvious that milk production yields very little, if any, profit to him. Some men who have adopted modern methods and milk by machinery, reduce their labour bill considerably; others are able to serve a market by the aid of motor lorries and so avoid railway expenses. There are still more fortunate men who run a dairy as a sideline to their farming in some neighbouring town where there is a big demand and so make money. Others carry on without showing a profit and very many make a loss.

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'I must be able to mend the land,' said a big farmer to me after deploring losses that appeared to be due to circumstances beyond his control, and I find that I lose less money on my dairy than on fattening bullocks; so I keep it going.' Like many other agriculturists he had no illusions; he knew that he was losing money on his stock, but, as he pointed out, he must have manure for his fields, and just as he grew wheat more for the straw than the grain, so he kept cows to help to mend his land. This question of milk production is a grave one. A campaign to urge the public to drink more milk has not been conspicuously successful, nor will it be possible to drink more milk for long if farmers are compelled to work for the profit of singularly astute bodies of men who drive them down to subsistence level or even a little below it. It may be in this direction that Government intervention will be called for. A study of the accounts of the United Dairies, Ltd., provides significant reading, though they are hard to analyse.

If the farmer can receive a fair share of the price that the consumer pays, there is no reason why we should not see a very considerable extension of the milkproducing industry, and even some development of the manufacturing side which has been exploited to the full on the Continent where all manner of articles from umbrella handles to cups and saucers have milk as their basis. So far as foreign supplies are concerned, the import of new milk need not perhaps to be taken seriously; but the farmer is protesting, and rightly,

against the importation of skimmed milk in which there is an enormous trade running into millions of pounds This stuff is to all intents and purposes - per annum. worthless; quite cheap, though yielding an abundant profit to the importer, it is given to children by mothers who are unable to realise that there is no nutritive value in it; undoubtedly this imported rubbish must be responsible in some measure for the infant mortality in big manufacturing centres. The farmer asks that the importation of such worthless stuff may be stopped altogether, and it is hard to a request should be ignored. grievance save against the successfully to deprive him of the fruit of his labours. With a little encouragement he could go very far with milk production on suitable soil, by reason of one of the latest and most significant developments of recent years.

see why so very reasonable Apart from this, he has no big combines that seek so

This is intensive grass farming which is being carried out this year experimentally on some eighty farms throughout the United Kingdom and in the Irish Free State. The system was invented by a Jersey farmer and developed by certain German professors and agriculturists. It was the subject of an agricultural Conference held at Caius College, Cambridge, in the spring of the year, when the Ministry sent for all its organisers and advisers and gave them a series of addresses by experts on this fascinating subject. The adjective is chosen deliberately, for intensive grass cultivation has in it much that surprises and even thrills the man who is, or has been, an agriculturist. I was fortunate in seeing the new system in working order on farms in the North Riding of Yorkshire and the north of Wiltshire, and it is at present so little known that a brief description will not be out of place.

In the first instance, the pastures reserved for special treatment are railed off into four or five acre strips, and these strips would be larger if more cows were to be grazed. There is a winter treatment with artificial manures (Chilean nitrate, or carbonate of lime, superphosphate, and kainit) that brings the land into good heart and enables grazing to start as much as three weeks earlier than it would in normal circumstances in a hard county. As many as fifty cows can be turned on

to a five-acre strip when the grass is just four inches long and at its highest proteid value. The cows eat their fill and are then driven into an adjacent pasture or on to rough land until they are milked, milking in this part being carried out three times daily. When the cows come out they are returned again to the rich pasture for another filling meal and are then removed again, the object being to keep the feeding pasture as clean as possible. At the end of five days they are moved to a fresh strip which has reached four inches by now, and the ground they have left is grazed by barren cows or heifers, and is then harrowed two or three times and sometimes dressed with a little sulphate of ammonia or nitrate of soda. The cows eat their way through the strips in turn and come back to them again as the grass is rising to the required height. For the first month they sleep under cover, and they remain out until October or even a little later. They are not affected by frost; on the farm I visited they had been out in ten degrees and had suffered no harm. They are only brought in when the autumn is moving towards winter, nearly a fortnight later than cows on less carefully treated grass. In all, the farmer gets an extra five weeks of grazing in the open and so saves five weeks of expensive cake feeding.

The total expense of fences, water, manuring, harrowing, and the rest are in the neighbourhoood of 4l. 10s. per acre; but against this outlay the herd of fifty cows increased its yield by more than 3000 gallons; the bill for purchased foodstuffs was reduced by nearly 4007.; and within the year the whole of the additional outlay called for by the new method had been covered. In the North Riding of Yorkshire early summer grass is worth two gallons of milk per cow, elsewhere it is worth much more; so at first sight the gain will not be great in the West country. At the same time a much heavier head can be maintained. It is reasonable to expect that in the districts that have a moderate rainfall this new system of intensive cultivation will be carried out with good results, and in the course of the next twelve months we shall have returns from the numerous centres of experiment which will go far to proclaim the truth. In the experiment at Wootton Bassett where Chilean

nitrate is used in place of sulphate of ammonia and synthetic nitrogen, I thought the pasture was decidedly better, but the quality may well have been inherent. It is at least clear that the system will work out well without limitation to any one artificial fertiliser. But we shall do well to remember that increased milk production is of little or no use to the farmer until he can get a fair price for his produce. While he remains in the hands of combines his necessity will provide their opportunity, and as milk becomes more and more plentiful the price paid by the middlemen will tend to go down, though the consumer will not benefit. As usual the pioneers will be the men who will make money. Those who wait until the system has been proved beyond a peradventure, will come in too late to derive full benefit. This is happening in sugar beet production.

Throughout the country one finds that the best farmers are quite alive to the facts of the situation and are endeavouring, if they have not exhausted their capital and energy, to look upon new fields of activity. But the areas of definite prosperity are small. In the Holland Division of Lincolnshire, for example, men still make fortunes whether they gather them in potatoes, or bulbs or market gardening or corn growing. In other parts of Lincolnshire big money is being made on silt and warp land. If we turn to Lancashire, which is not an agricultural county, we find great wealth is amassed by the poultry keepers, who are said to contribute something between a quarter and a third of all the poultry produce that is collected from England, Scotland, and Wales. The official returns show over four million birds, but these returns ignore the holdings of one acre and under on which the greater part of the country's birds are reared. Growers do not traffic outside their own county, their produce finds a ready market in the great industrial centres. Big men keep enormous flocks, one hears of numbers approaching fifty thousand under one control; the small men keep a few birds in a back garden, but all are keen, and those who have the necessary money to start in business can earn a good living. They tell you up there that a man with 1000%., who has had the right training and is prepared to work hard, can earn 300l. a year without difficulty and without

resort to selling settings of eggs at fancy prices and pedigree birds at prices more fanciful still. The Lancashire poultry producers have solved their selling problem through the medium of their Federation of Poultry Societies and their Egg Producers' Society. They sell within the county at a fair price, and will assure you in all seriousness that there would be no stale eggs in Lancashire, other than the cheap imported varieties, were it not for the practice of the middlemen who come to Preston Market. They buy when prices are low and hold for a rise, with the only possible result.

If the rest of the agricultural producers in these islands could do the same the whole of the agricultural problem would disappear. When you have studied all the farmer's difficulties; when you have considered every difficulty in turn, including doubtful weather, bad land, old-fashioned handling, scarce or inefficient labour, and the rest, you are left with the certain knowledge that the real solution of these difficulties does not lie in protection, or subsidies, or the safeguarding of industries, or in any other of the cures that are put forward with such readiness of assertion, but rather is to be found in proper adjustment of the difference between the price the producer receives and the price the consumer pays. The real enemies of agriculture are the rings, the trusts, the combines; all the bodies of traders that take the farmer's produce and make intermediate profits. The other enemies of agriculture are the farmers who will submit to be robbed rather than unite in their own defence. When wheat growing was in grave difficulties in Canada a few seasons ago, the agriculturists established wheat pools in the three corn-growing areas and saved the situation. Our English farmers will not unite, and consequently they are robbed by those who conspire to despoil them. The facts of the robbery are notorious. The Commission so ably presided over by Lord Linlithgow published several admirable Reports, and the gravest criticism that can be directed against the Government is that they allowed these Reports to be shelved. Examples of injustice to the producer abound. We know that a year or two ago when potatoes were being sold at 30s. a ton on the farms, they were being retailed at 97. a ton in the shops.

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