SMALL FARMS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 7, Issue 370, 23 April 1866, Page 1

SMALL FARMS.

(Prom .the Australasian.) We are able by this time to form some practical idea of tbe working of tbe Land Act. It has been a great experiment; and while largely dissenting from many of its details, and utterly denouncing the unscrupulous manner in which in some parts and by certain individuals—whether with or without superior influence we do not choose to say —tbe scheme was carried out, wo are bound in fairness to admit that, to a considerable extent, the experiment has been a success. Mr Grant, iu the Assembly, stated that there, were, approximately no doubt, on March 14, 1865. 500,000 acres thrown open, and at the present time the number is probably over a million. Passing over for futui’e notice that comparatively small section of tbe cultivators who, having purchased the 320acre blocks, may be reasonably expected to have brought with them a certain amount of capital for the utilisation of their purchases, we prefer to come to that most useful of all useful classes, where they are once honajide established in a country, tiie small cultivators, whom some great sheep-owners, in a species of malignant fun, choose to cail “ cockatoos,” but whom old England called “ yeomen,” which, being translated out of the Teutonic means “good men” —the set of fellows who won Cressy and Agincourt, and who are exactly the class to set up Australia, if they were up to this work and knew how to set about it. The value of the class is at present immense, precisely because without them we cannot really in the long run raise wheat, barley, oats, potatoes, iu fact, whatever we want of cereal products. Either they must raise it, or the larger proprietors must raise it, or we must import it. Importation is, of course, the last and worst necessity. It is difficult to expect cheap bread from large ■proprietors owning from 300 acres to 3000 upwards, and putting capital into their great agricultural establishments just upon the same principle as a capitalist lodges his money with a bank. People who have from £IO,OOO to <£30.000 will not farm when they can practically get at least ten per cent., if they do not get more, from the .hanks, or, even reckoning in the bad years, from twelve to fifteen, say or .eighteen, by squatting. The intermediate farmers are the ones. Little is to be got from the farmer of three hundred acres, with, we will say £4OOO, until, very cheap machinery is extensively used, and the supply of agricultural labor is doubled in quantity and doubled in quality. To him life is a strong struggle, and generally, except in exceptional cases, a decided ill-success. Taking one thing with another, the man who has to pay for hired labor has to pay for it three times as much as at home, not so much from the actual .money as from the badness of the work done. The outgoings are constant, the incomings dubious, and he is tiierefore pretty nearly always in a mess, unless periodically relieved of it through the Insolvent Court, a nasty state of things for himself, and a perilous one for a nation which has to depend for its supply upon the precarious exertions of such meu, generally embarrassed, and very seldom successful. It is, therefore, to small farmers, whether proprietors or tenant-farmers, owning from fifteen to fifty acres, that we have to Jook

for the remedy for this unhealthy state of things—the men, in a word, that employ no labor, but labor themselves. Such men, if industrious, sober, and intelligent,, must not only inevitably themselves grow comparatively rich, but, with their aggregate riches, small though they may be in the particular, go to swell enormously the aggregate wealth of the nation. If, for example, Protestants though we are, we were to name two countries in which the agricultural classes are most prosperous, we should name two small Homan Catholic countries, Belgium and Tuscany. A Belgian farmer, at least in the countries of East and West Flanders, Antwerp, and so on, seldom owns above ten to twenty acres. His soil, speaking of Belgium, is among the worst. The public road is commonly a masss of unmacadamized drift sand, through which the wearied pedestrian flounders on ankle deep. A deep chickweed covered ditch and a dense havviiK/j.n hedge looks more like a section of a botanical garden than the property of a poor peasant, though poor by-the-bye he is not, for there is always in his sung-roomed tenement a bees-waxed polished room of state, never to be entered except upon state occasions, such as births, marriages, deaths, and by peculiarly honored guests. His wife and daughters have always ornaments of pure ducat gold, and he is seldom without an odd hundred or two, not in the bank, for he knows nothing of banks, but lent out in small sums to his less industrious neighbors. All this is achieved by common sense, immense industry, and knowing bis business. His ground is tesselated like a chess-board "by every species of crop —now aud then an acre, sometimes half an acre, oftener a rood —hemp, flax, lucerne, sainfoin, mangoldwurtzel, cabbage, kohl-raben,.- carrots, parsnips, tobacco, wheat, and beaus. He stall feeds all bis cattle, aud like Johnny Chinaman with us, the best practical gardener we Lave among us, keeps a liquid-manure tank, and does not spare it to his vegetables. His pig yard is full of gruuters, and his poultry yard is alive with ducks, geese, and fowls, wnich the good wife attends to. In Tuscany, under a climate which is the very ditto of the Australian, the Metayer, as he is called, is commonly only a small tenant farmer, who pays his rent in produce, but the system is practically tbe same. He has little more land than the Belgian, hut it is commonly very rich. Accordingly, his agriculture is utterly different. He grows maize to some extent, olives pretty generally, wine to a great amount, though commonly of a bad quality, but mulberry trees invariably for the production of silk. His wife and children manage pretty nearly all, and though the Tuscan wife cannot, like the Belgian, go on fairdays and holidays with gold ornaments, like the Belgians, owing to a bad Government, yet they are a happy and a contented lot, vegetating it may be, but most comfortable vegetables, upon plots upon which an Australian would starve. These are foreign “ cockatoo farmers,” who are nature’s gentlemen and ladies, rather rough, but entirely respectable; who pay their way, do their duty to God and man, aud are the back-bone of a country. Why should not Australia have the like ? The way to have the like is to have them under the like conditions. There is no reason on earth why anyone coming out to Australia with a strong constitution, a steady pair of arms, and last, not least, a good wife, should not double annually his expenditure. But he must not look to what the Belgian calls “ small economies.” Ten acres of good ground should give to a really straightforward honest man £2OO a-year, “ How ?” says the new chum, who puts his plot in wheat at once, whether it be at four shillings or eight shillings the quarter. We should say, do not be “John Bullish;” on your tweuty-acre plot do not plant above oneeighth with the same produce.. If your wife aud daughters fancy crinolines, burn them. Keep innumerable cocks and hens, diitks and geese, where they can be got. Let the wife aud girls look to these. But over this should be an instructive head, to watch the failing points; and we are more and more convinced that Mr 'Bindou was not far wrong in impressing on the late Parliament the neces sity for a Minister of Agriculture.