VICTORIAN FARMING.

North Otago Times, Volume II, Issue 29, 8 September 1864, Page 2 (Supplement)

VICTORIAN FARMING.

Many portions of the following article, from the Melbourne " Argus," are applicable to New Zealand as well as Victoria, and may be profitably read by our readers. It gives many good hints as to the mode of realising wealth fi'oni our fields, and proves that to a country which raises no gold, her wheati fields may be made as good to her as gold :— " South Australia is exultant in the very point in which our weakness is manifest. She raises no gold, but her wheat-fields are to her as good as gold. ' Never,' says the Adelaide journal, ' had a South Australian Treasurer such a favorable report to present of the real material progress of the colony as that which it was Mr Hart's privilege to lay before the House of Assembly/ From the 31st March, 1863, to the same date, 1864, the value of cereals exported was £1,011,989, being an increase over the preceding year of £307,511. In Victoria, the cultivated area gives only four-fifths of an acre to each individual ; in South Australia, it gives nearly four acres. In Victoria, the proportion of the land disposed of was under nine acres to each head of the population ; in South Australia, it was nearly twenty acres. Yet the actual return of produce upon the average of the last four years, has been decidedly in favor of the golden colony. The yield of the Adelaide corn-fields, even in the last exceptionally favorable year, was only fourteen bushels to the acre, while with Victoria it has steadily averaged over twenty. The fact that the colony which proportionately yield3 the least should steadily export to the one which rateably produces the most, arises solely from the excess of land, in proportion to population, iu cultivation in the one over the other. The number, in fact, of the coosumers of food in Victoria, compared with the producers, is startlingly great. We are like a tadpole, all head. - Of the 557,444 inhabitants at the end of 1862, Melbourne alone accounted for 130,000. Add to these the people of Geelong, Ballarat, and Sandhurst, and the thousands upon thousands on the goldfields, and it is intelligible enoguh why an almost purely agricultural and pastoral population, like the South Australian, should, in the food question, give us the go-by. Of California, the same cannot be said. With a less population than our own, with only 380,000 inhabitants, she not only turns up annually as much gold as Victoria, New South Wales, and New Zealand together, but after feeding her own population, has a very considerable export. Of no earlier, or, in truth, of later growth than ourselves, she might, with double the gold yield, be considered reasonably entitled to purchase her food ; but she will not. In the year 1863, she had 263,208 acres sown ; while, in the same year, we had but 162,000. The produce was 4,147,649 bushels, while our own was under 3,000,000 bushels. To quote her other profitable productions would form too long a i list. To put it briefly, proud as we are of our i all but unparalleled growth, and the nascent empire which within a dozen years has among us arisen like a dream vision out of chaos, we must humble our pride to admit that in most things our trans-Pacific relatives have done all that Ave have done, and a great deal more into the bargain. " No doubt the land laws and the price of land have had much to do with this agricultural superiority of the American colony. People naturally purchase more of a good article cheap than of a good article dear, and when superior land is to be had at five shillings, there will always be a likelihood of much more of it being bought than were it, like ours, at a pound. With a fertile soil, and one of the loveliest climates on earth, California has likewise far greater advantages of transport than this colony. Like us, it has its mountain background, but this, instead of, like the Australian Alps and tho dividing range running closely parallel to the sea, and in parts, as at Cape Otway, forming itself the spa coast, retires, for the most part, considerably in the interior. The clear waters of the Saeremento, bisecting the agricultural plaius, with equal rapidity and cheapness to the capital the riches of the inland harvests. The blue waves of the Pacific, in spacious inlets and innumerable bays and coves, kiss the very edge of the fields, and the farmer can at once transfer his grain to the markets of the world. But making all allowance for these exceptional advantages, the great cau^e of the d'fference must be sought in the diverse characteristics of the two nationalities. The census shows that, in Victoria, uineteentwentieths of the people are either born in the British Islands, or their offspring. The fact tells two ways. To our direct descent from a comparatively pure and most energetic stock, we doubtless owe very much of our energy, industry, and average immunity from cjime. To the same, however, in a nearly equal degree, we owe that which unfortunately distinguishes us from the versatile natives of the States — the inability to turn our hands at a moment's notice to a new occupation. The native of the British Islands is pre-eminently a man of specialties. He can do one thing extraordinarily well, but only one. The child of an advanced and elaborate civilization, a unit in a huge aggregate of millions, when shaken out of his original line, he has the greatest difficulty in shifting into a new one. As a farmer, therefore, he either farms in his old country style, or he cannot form at all. If Victorian farmers were to be classified in like manner, the number to be ranked in the first would be almost too few for notice, not owing to absolute ignorance, but to ignorance of that culture which siiits the soil and climate of these latitudes. The denizens of a region which is most analogous to Italy and Southern France, they grow the same crops, and in the same manner, as they would do in Norfolk or the Lothians. The other, and much more common specimen of the cultivator, is one who holds of farming as Dogberry did of learning, that it comes by the grace of God. He may have been a miner, sailor, tailor, carpenter, or simply developed himself out of the pure and unadulterated loafer, as grubs turn into moths, but he has never been a farmer here or elsewhere. He crops the ground over and over again without variety, and is astonished that weeds and brambles are the upshot ! Having radically ruined his acres for years to come, he throws

them up in despair, and declares that farming will not pay. The Yankee farmer, on the contrary, comes to his land without likes or dislikes, prejudices or theories, looking only to the soil and the climate, and to what will best pay. He has very likely had a dozen trades before, of all of which ho knows something, though not much, and of which in those vast agricultural regions farming has been sure to be one. He grows wheat like the Victorians, but not only wheat, but a little of everything else that the soil will produce — vines, olives, and pumpkins, squash, melons, tobacco. His store is full of bacon and hams, of butter and cheese ; his garden supplies him with honey, and his farmyard is resonant with the regiments of his rejoicing poultry. Never staking much on a single crop, he has a constant insurance against absolute loss, and a complete failure in one direction only induces him to try more vigorously in another wholly different. We have no wish to see our farmers converted into Americans, but they may with advantage imitate that spirit of versatility and adaptiveness which enables the Californian, while producing twice the yield of the Victorian gold-mines, to send in addition the surplus of his harvests to the markets of the Pacific."

A clergyman having preached during Lent in a small town in which he had not once been invited to dinner, said, in a sermon exhorting his parishioners against being seduced by the prevailing vices of the age, " I have preached against every vice but luxurious living, having had no opportunity of observing to what extent it is carried out in this town." An offender fined a second time is not necessarily refined.