Farming Decay in England

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 169, 7 October 1927, Page 13

Farming Decay in England

Great Decrease in Cultivation j The annual agricultural returns issued by the Ministry of Agriculture show that land under the plough in England and Wales decreased during the year ending June 4 last bv 238.000 acres. It is now 690,000 acres less than pre-war. That is to say, all the big increase in arable cultivation achieved during the war has been lost, and 690,000 acres besides, says a recent article in the “Daily Chronicle.” Nor is arable the only loser; the total area of land under crops or permanent grass has decreased by 87,000 acres. About three-quarters of this has come down to “rough grazings"; the rest has disappeared from farming altogether. Much of the latter, no doubt, represents land swallowed up by houses and housing schemes—too often, alas, among: the best, for agriculture in its districts. But. the thing to note is, that while the farmed area shrinks inevitably on that side, it makes no compensating expansion on the other, i.e., by conquering the wastes. On the contrary, the wastes conquer it. Consider in this aspect the heavy decreases in cats and barley. Barley shrunk to an area about half-a-million acres less than pre-war. The seriousness of this is that it is a crop grown largely on light soils, which but for it would not be tilled, and whose untilled output of any kind will be negligible. When lost to barley, therefore, such soils become lost to productivity altogether. Only two crop increases are reported. One is wheat, which has gone up by 180,000 acres in two years—an extremely welcome increase, if it can be maintained. The other is sugar-beet, which has developed partly at the expense of other root-crops, and entirely on a subsidy basis. As a whole it is a discouraging picture. With the world’s finest market for food products at Us very door, we see the farm industry of England and Wales steadily dwindling. The results of the present year, with its terribly trying seasonal conditions—drought in what should have been growing time and incessant rain in what should have been ripening time —are not likely to show much but a further decline. Mi*. Baldwin and his colleagues ire not responsible for the weather, but they have a. heavy responsibility for much else. This is their third season in office; so far they have done nothing for agriculture; and there is no prospect of their doing anything. Figuratively, they stand with their hands in their pockets, looking on while farmers gc bankrupt, labourers draw a bottom wage, and land falls fast out of cultivation.