Holland Has Not Enough Land For Her Young Farmers

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 58, 28 February 1949, Page 8

Holland Has Not Enough Land For Her Young Farmers

In view of the recent arrival of four young Dutch farm workers in the Waikato it is interesting to read that the Dutch, the most densely populated race in the world, claim that they produce 4000 new farmers a year. That is to say there are every year that additional number of adults with tlje background, training and desire to go farming—and often with the cash—but for whom there just isn’t enough land. They realise the value to the nation of those 4000 potential farmers and do their best to meet their needs. Hence the great scheme to obtain new farming land by “impoldering” the Zuider Zee. But that isn’t enough, so the Dtuch look farther afield. They have looked right across the Atlantic to Dutch Guiana on the northeast coast of South America, and not far north of the Equator. Guiana rises inland to the hills and where altitude is high enough the land is good and is used. But about half the country, through which five big rivers flow to the sea, is at present bog, much of it below sea-level. Soil is mainly alluvial but the complete lack of proper drainage renders it unfarmable. t Holland was once like that, but the Dutch reclaimed it. So to make farms for their annual newcomers to farming, they have announced a big scheme to impolder Guiana and farm it properly.

For the benefit of those who are not acquainted with that peculiarly Dutch word, “to impolder” means to dyke off land from the sea, and having removed the threat of periodical inundation, to pump-drain the whole place and reclaim to useful agricultural land.