PRIMARY PRODUCTION.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19163, 21 November 1927, Page 10

PRIMARY PRODUCTION.

t STATISTICIAN'S SURVEY. AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION. I (TROK OU* OWN COBRESFOVDEHT.) I SYDNEY, November 10. j Mr 0. H. Wickens, Commonwealth I Statistician, is regarded as one of the world's leading experts in his profession, and he has an international reputation for his opinions concerning production. Lately, Mr Wickens has been giving lectures to public organisations which have proved that the Statistician's work and views can be made as interesting as less technical subjects. In such a survey recently, Mr Wickens dealt with primary and secondary production. He suggested that those who considered the farmer's "grouch" was.not warranted might take on the farmer's trials for a term. Not in a, dilettante way with a week-end block and shack, but on a genuine small farm. If after a late spring frost they were able to come up smiling he thought the experimental farmer would merit canonisation. As one born on a farm, Mr Wickens was. convinced that the life of the ordinary small farmer was not the idyllic picture that it was apt to bo painted. He quoted a character in a novel, 0. N. Buck's "Destiny," who said: "It is all very pastoral to talk about milk from the sweet-breathed cow, but for ten years I was lady's maid to two singularly repulsive cows. To this day the sight of a cow gives me cramps in the fingers and melancholy in the soul." Mr Wickens said that in the 50 years between 1871 and 1921 the proportion of Australian breadwinners engaged in primary production declined from 44 per cent, to 26 per cent. Britain, the United States, and Canada had show,n similar declines. It was too comparatively unprogressive countries such as Eussia, India, and China that the proportion of primary producers continued relatively high. There was a widespread tendency to regard primary industries as involving production par excellence, and secondary industries as of inferior status. That view was largely due to the fact that the primary producer was so closely in contact with the forces of Nature—rain, drought, and sunshine —and more than all, with that, mysterious and powerful'force which converted dead grain into waving fields and replaced existing flocks and herds by new and larger generations. The primary producer, however, was apt to be treated as if he were their creator instead of being merely the master of ceremonies. A Wasting Asset. An aspect of the question often lost sight of, said Mr Wickens, waß that the sources of primary industry were in the nature of a wasting asset. It was true that much of the wastage could be made good by the return to the soil in the shape of fertilisers, but there they came too close to the domain of secondary industries. A secondary industry carried on by a country which imported its raw materials and exported much of its production provided an example of extensive services being rendered without any serious depletion of assets. In other words, primary industry was in many of its branches a "robber" industry, whereas secondary industry consisted mainly in the development of utilities latent in raw materials, the product of primary industry. The idea that secondary industry. was parasitic was unsound, but it was by no means certain that primary industry might not and had not been directed wastefully.

What then, asked Mr "Wickens, was the cause of agricultural depression in so many countries of the world? It was evidently not the effect of fiscal policy, for in the United States, Canada, and Australia, the primary producers had been the strongest advocates of freetrade, whereas in countries such as Germany and Britain the conditions were reversed. It appeared to him that one of the outstanding causes was the failure in most cases to apply to agriculture those business principles which are regarded as essential in industry. Investigations into costing methods and the conduct of agricultural surveys should be carried out extensively, and there should be research into agricultural economics.