Page 16 Advertisements Column 1

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19171, 30 November 1927, Page 16

AUCTIONS. H. MATSON AND CO. H. MATSON and CO., COMMISSION FARM SALESMEN, live by commissions. Wo are indeed some factor in the trade. TO THE MAN ON THE LAND wo make a straight appeal and ask him not to forget the time wo have been in business. (Extract from "Tjondon HELF-KELIANCE IN AGRICULTURE. THERE is little pleasant reading in the fourth and laat of our Agricultural •orrcspondent's seasonal reports on the crops of tho year which we publish to-day. With one or two local exceptions, this has been tho worst year for formers that the longest living memory can recall. The hardships and anxieties of the situation are aggravated by the irony of the fact that until they were exposed to the incessant and untimely rains of harvest and nay lime the yields both of corn and of hay were particularly good and abundant. As it is, both before and after cutting, they have lost much of their virtue and their value. In some cases the destruction has been so extensivo that they were not worth carrying; in almost all the work of harvesting has been unusually long and costly; and, to add to the farmers' troubles, tho ■wet weather has- thrown all field operations out of 'joint. For numbers of farmers the chief legacy of the past season is a depressing prospect of sodden lands and a luxuriant growth of weeds, the combined effect of which in itself threatens seriously to handicap tho enterprise of the coming year. Tho outlook is, in fact, so serious that somo even of the most reputable farmers and Blockownen in tho country ore losing heart. They are resolved, wo •aro told, to givo up the business, either because they cannot afford to carry on, or in order to save what little capital they have left. There may be a time, writes, ono of them, when farming will pay again, but, he adds, "certainly not in the near future, as far as I can see." At the present time you have "WOOL. Why not send some of it to H. MATSON and CO. They have got the interests of the local realisation at heart and have fought the battles of local realisation for many years besides being responsible for tho first sale held in Canterbury. This is a hard saying. Its importance lies in the fact that it expresses the views of a farmer of wide practical experience. It in quoted as a significant expression of an opinion which is probably shared by many others of similar standing. That, however, is not to say that it is necessarily correct. The ono fact of all others which emergen from our agricultural correspondent's frank and uncompromising review of the j>ast season is that the villain of the piece in the weather, and the weather, as the Prime Minister hinted in his Sardiff speech, is a thing beyond the control of any Government. In other respects the Government have done muoh moro for fanning and farmers than is generally realised They have, as Mr Baldwin pointed out, mode serious efforts to help tho industry financially 1 " by reducing the bufden of the rates tin farm buildings ns well as on land, by an annual grant of a million and a half to tho xurai joads, and by the subsidy, amounting this year to. four and a half millions, to the beet industry. Further subsidies it is not in their power, or in tho power of any othor party, to provide, and to ask for them i is to ory for the moon. Besides these substantial aids they propose to submit to Parliament next year a scheme for making rr.oro credit available to farmers. But they canhot possibly insure the industry against the recurrence of bad seasons—"this terrible harvest weathei' We have had this year." If the early promise of this year's crops had been fulfilled, the gloomy propheoy relegating the day -when farming may again become a paying concern to a remote future would in all probability never have been made. Farmers of ail men are bound by the exigencies and teaching of their ■work to take long and not short-sighted •views of its prospects. They have to do •with the rotations of good and bad seasons ns well as of crops. At the present moment they ate passing through a period Of depression of perhaps unexampled severity. But the industry has been hard hit by calamities nearly if not quite as disastrous ] YOU want to buy RAPE AND ITALIAN for green feed as it is essential that this year you must | put them in. The sooner you take your lambs away from the ewe and put them on to green feed, the better, as your ewe has had a bad season and she requires a thorough spell before next year. H. MATSON and CO. before, and has survived them, and those engaged in it now can hardly hope to p*o- - its prosperity by making up their mind* that the return of the good times will be eo long deferred as to necessitate a feeling of despair. Reflections of this kind, no doubt, are cold comfort to men •who are losing their money in the struggle and who have to face the risks of bankruptcy. But in farming, more almost than in any other British enterprise, courage, endurance, and self-reliance are an immemorial tradition, and, for the sake of agriculture and its inestimable- value to the life of the nation, it is a matter of great importance that the tradition should never be allowed to die out. The beat hope for the fnture of agriculture lies, in fact, in the determination of all concerned in it to do everything in their individual and corporate power to enable it t.j stand on its own feet. The real help must come from within and not from with* out, from action rather than from legislation. A notable example of a promising oflort in this direction is reported to-day in a message frpm our correspondent in Keudal. Some months ago Lotd Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Lord Lieutenant of Westmoreland, suggested in these columns that the lord lieutenant of eaoh county should convene a meeting of farmers And landowners in his area to consider what practical steps can bo taken to form combinations—whioh ho claimed were vital to the life of the country—for the marketing of agricultural produce. As the result of a YOUR LAMBS have been going back for the last twelve weeks and a checked lamb takes something to start it. Many aro indolent enough to leave the lambs with the owes, expecting to fatten them off the owes. Can it be done a season like this? Turn over your ground and put in green feed, spell your ewe, therefore ensuring your next season's crop of lambs and you will fatten your lambs and get them away this season without exhausting your farm and pasture lands. H. MATSON and CO. meeting which he himself convened on Saturday at Kendal—when a paper on the subject was read by Mr A. D. Street, head of the Markets and Co-operation branch of the Ministry of Agriculture—a committee representative of the National Farmers' Union, the Lunesdale Farmers' Society, and the landowners' organisation has been formed for its further consideration. 'Mr Street was careful to point out that better marketing is not to be regarded as a sovereign remedy for agricultural depession, and does not mean the replacing of the existing machinery of distribution by a farmer-owned co-operative systom, •which would probably break down under its own weight. He agrees, that is to say, with Mr Baldwin that though better marketing is not a complete oure it is a necessity for any agriculture, whether depressed or prosperous, and holds further that its proper use is to aid the existing machinery of distribution to work to greater advantage, so far as homo produce is concorned, than it does to-day. The co-opera-tive assembling of produce in the areas oi surplus production he regards as the legitimate and profitable sphere of the producer; {Troup marketing, he says, is or should be. more efficient than marketing by individual producers in regard to such services as the preparation, classing, grading, packing, and dispatch of supplies, as well as in the search for outlets and the orderly feeding of markets. Only in exceptional cases can even the large-scale producer, as an individual, market a standard agricultural product continuously and in commercial quantities; as a general rule the ungraded contributions of individual producers must first be assembled at convenient centres in order to provide the bulk necessary for the grading process and for the maintenance of graded output. SEND US your ordefa for COBNSACKB and BINDER TWINE. What other stock agents sell at We sell at. H. MATSON and CO. From this Mr Street went on to say that the greatest problem which confronts the British fanner in the marketing fields is that of devising a workable system for the standardisation of his products. Because of it* superior economy tho. standardisation of grsdes and, where applicable, of containers, he considers'an inevitable reform. Both in foreign countries and in the Dominions its beneficial effect in the stimulation of production and of demand has been clearly proved, and it must infallibly be made the I ruling principle by home producers for the | home market. In this country it appears ! that the best lint of advance would be for m •ultabttxa ths light oi trad* •xpsxtoos,