THE VALUE of SMALL HOLDINGS.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 170, 17 January 1895, Page 2

THE VALUE of SMALL HOLDINGS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE STAR. Sir, —ln the course of my business I have often to drive down the Kimbolton road, and a few nights ago I was struck by the absence of houses between Cheltenham and the Borough town. It seems to me a pity that so much fine, level land should be lying, to all intents and purposes, idle like a desert. I hear the block contains six thousand acres belonging to one man. Now, I know one settler on the Stanway road who has forty acres of no better land, from which he manages to get a comfortable living for himself, his wife, and five children. Now, I ask, is it not the interest of every ratepayer, and the duty of every householder, who desires the advancement of Feilding to put their names to . a petition to the Minister of Lands' to acquire that land under the existing laws which enable him to do so. Just fancy if this six thousand acre block was cut up into fifty or one hundredacre sections, what a number of industrious people would be able to maintain tbemse Ives. Five hundred men, women, and children, would in a few years be seen where now nothing but a few straggling sheep are observed by the passer by. There is the Cheltenham Butter Factory handy for the dairy farmers, while good money could be earned by gardening, and keeping pigs and fowls. Feilding will never come to anything great until the large blocks of land surrounding it, owned by one or two individuals, are cut up into small farms and properly settled. I am, etc., Advance Feilding.