SETTLED ON FARMS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22504, 12 September 1938, Page 8

SETTLED ON FARMS

UNEMPLOYED MEN AT WORK SCHEME WILL BE EXTENDED % MINISTER INTERESTED IN PAKIHI LANDS So much success has attended the Government’s scheme for the settlement of unemployed workers cn the land that it is intended to extend it considerably. This was stated by the Minister for Labour, the Hon. H. T. Armstrong, in an interview with “The Press” on Saturday. The new plans involve a great deal of work on the West Coast pakihi areas. “We put these men on to abandoned farms and other farms which were going back out of production even before the slump,” Mr Armstrong said. “Now under our scheme a great deal of this land has been brought back into economic production. Instead of giving one section of land to one man to work—and to work for a lifetime before he got anything out of it at all—we have been using gangs of men with up-to-date methods and machinery, to get these farms into working order for the men employed on them. The scheme is under the control of the Minister for Lands, the Hon. F. Langstone, but we are assisting financially. Quite a few of these men, starting originally as members of the bigger parties put on to clean up the country, have now been set up in business as farmers on the land they have so developed. Quite a number of the farms are business propositions on which the men are doing remarkably well. They have been able to take Jheir farms over as going concerns, and we have achieved by our new methods as much development in six months as it would take years under the old system of giving a man 100 acres of rough country and telling him to bring it into production himself. Cheap Development “We are getting very good and so successful has the scheme proved that we intend to extend it a lot,” Mr Armstrong said. “We are particularly interested in the great areas of-pakihi lands in Buller and up in the Nelson district. Ulitil recently this land was always considered useless and unproductive; but experiments have revealed the deficiencies and the best methods of making use of what can become very good land after treatment -t low cost. We have now no doubt about the success of the scheme for'-, bringing this country into production —it is in areas where good land is scarce for dairying—and we hope to see important results.” Tribute to Mr Webb Mr Armstrong paid a tribute to the enthusiasm which had been shown by the Minister for Mines, the Hon. P. C v Webb, in pushing the claims of the' pakihi country. It had taken some time to convince the authorities of the possibilities of that class of land, he said, but now the development of the pakihi plains had gone beyond the experimental stages and had been proved a payable proposition. There were tens of thousands of acres capable of development. “I do not think that we can find better employment for the labour of these men than in bringing waste land into use,” the Minister said, “and my department, with the Public Works Department and the Department of Agriculture, is doing its sha^e.”