Is Farming In The Machine Age Easier?

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 17, 8 November 1948, Page 3

Is Farming In The Machine Age Easier?

The Dorset • farmer-broadcaster Ralph Wightman has a rare and liberal conviction that the men and women on the land today ' work harder than their fathers and forefathers. In a ‘broadcast in the BBC’s General Overseas, series “British Farmer” he proved his point in regard to ploughing.. He used to walk behind a horse drawn plough; he said, doing less than two miles an hour and covering 12 miles a day. Hi's nephew, sitting on a tractor,, wouldn’t walk two hundred yards in 24 hours, but he worked at higher pressure and with more nerve strain. Wightman’s horses knew their job and plodded up and down the' furrow' with only an occasional word from him. “Once a day perhaps I had to set up sticks in a line to draw a decent straight line and mark a fresh ridge,” he said. “This meant a certain amount of concentration to draw, a decent straight line; but for the rest of the day the horse knew more about ploughing than I did. There was no noise, no rattle, no bumps, no stench. Sometimes it was cold, and often it was wet, but the walking was just enough to keep my circulation going.” It was the same with every sort of farm work, he ielt. Milking cows used to be a peaceful thing, arid at harvest time there used to be a competition among the harvesters to be detailed to go to the cowsheds for the restful milking. But no one ever went to sleep using a milking machine, or even sat down to a milking machine. “In fact you have to do most jobs almost at a run,” Wightman commented. “Milking machines are all like other machines, they only save labour in the sense that one man can do the work of three. That one man almost always has to work harder, often under worse conditions, and always under greater nerve strain.”