LAND AT HOME

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 399, 7 December 1932, Page 3

LAND AT HOME

PROPERTY NEAR LONDON ' BELOW NEW ZEALAND PRICES. ENGLISHMAN ASTONISHED. Under the heading "From Hamilton to Wiltshire," Mr. W. Beach Thomas, a well-known English journalist, writes as follows in the London Spectator: — "A long letter has reaehed me from a youn'g emigrant to New Zealand, which' by a very apt eoincidence fits exactly with a simultaneous expression of English experience. The 'emigrant, after recording the heavy losses sustained hy farmers owing to the fall in values, concludes with this moral, in regard to a particular farm: 'He would have been all right if he had stuck to dairying.' "Now dairy farming in New Zealand i's of .an intensive nature, scarcely credible in the ears of English farmers. This young emigrant is already milking fifty heifers in his first few weeks on the farm, and expects to milk 120 before long. The farm, which is to support all these milch eows and a few bulls and other stock, including hens and bees, consists of 180 acres of gr.ass — that and no more — and most of the fodder is to come off it as well! Such heavy stocking, made possible by continuity rather than lushnes® of growth, and the absence of severe frosts, upse.ts any easy comparisons hetween the price of land there and here. "Nevertheles®, it is still a fair contention that land is absurdly cheap (as it is ruinously understocked) in IBngland; and is not .even yet as cheap as it should he in our Anti- . podes. You can still huy, within 60 miles of London, 2000 acres of land and a score of houses and many outhuildings, for £6000 to £7000, perhaps less." ■ ,