Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star THURSDAY. FEB. 15 1917 WONDERFUL DEVELOPMENT.

Hokitika Guardian, 15 February 1917, Page 2

Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star THURSDAY. FEB. 15 1917 WONDERFUL DEVELOPMENT.

Apropos of what can be done by knowledge and education in regard tc agricultural development, an article qas just been plaoed before na dealing with a pamphlet issued by the British Board of Agriculture on t‘The Reoent Development of German Agriculture.” The article remarks that there are one or two points on which we can learn much from Germany and suggests that the sooner the Empire starts to do so the better for it and its people. The pamphlet, it would appear, supplies much information for reflective consideration. The article, taken from a British journal, proceeds : There is plenty in this to start with, especially where it explains how this people, who seem to have no redeeming feature when turned out to fight, become veritable Hartz Mountain men in the way they extract food and riches from the most unpromising of soils. If the soil absolutely refuses to yield crops, then, we are told that the eucaess of the Germans in providing cheap power for farms through co-operative societies and other agencies for the supply of electricity should be noted. There is reason to hope that if our existing peat bogs cannot bB made to grow an appreciable quantity of food they might provide the energy which, transmitted elsewhere, would add to the productiveness of other soils. We can also learn much from the German methods of farming sandy soils, heaths and drained bogs from which peat has been stripped, and this applies to landowners all over the world. Again we are told that, based on a better scientific understanding of the laws of Nature, the method of carrying on agriculture was changed more and more into that of a business, producing finished articles from raw materials on lines simiUr to commercial manufacturing industries—that is to say, raw materials or half-finished goods, such as artificial manures and feeding-stuifs, are worked up into half or wholly finished goods of high value, while at the same time the necessity of maintaining a rational economic standpoint is not lost sight of, in that the soil and the plant food contained in the soil, which are the raw materials for the production of plants, are not uneconomically used up, but by constant additions thesoi is made richerjind more productive of valuable finished products. The use, in this way, of artificial manures alone the very life-b'o b-.of modern crops produced unrf > tense cultivation has increased uom approximately, 1,600,000 tons (1,000 kilos) in 1890 to about 7,000,000 tons—of the value

of about £25,000,000 —ia the year 1912. And then the Gorman belief in ploughing—it is simply great—for as their General Staff has eradicated every humane feeling out of the hearts of the people lest they should fight and behave less frightfully, so have the technical agricultural experts taught the farmers to extract ibe last onnoe of plant-food by means of the plough and cultivator from out of the soil, and good as the progress by German agriculturists has been during the past twenty-five years, the experts, still hope to increase their home grown output of food another fifty per cent in “ much less than a century.” No race, civilized or uncivilized, wants to copy the ways of the German military machine, bat it will be a foolish race that does net sit up and watch the progress made year by year in German agriculture, and not only watch, but strive to do as well, or even better.