SCOTTISH COMMISSIONERS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 234, 8 February 1911, Page 7

SCOTTISH COMMISSIONERS

THEIR IMPRESSIONS. Messrs James Keith and James Dunlop, members of the board of twelve Agricultural Commissioners who have been recently touring the Commonwealth of Australia, are now in the South Island. Mr. James Dunlop is a director of the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture, and is a very well known Ayrshire farmer and cattle-breeder, bis property being at Fenwick, Kilmarnock, lie has specialised in the breeding of Ayrshire cattle ami Border Leicester sheep, and has exported prize winning stock to every continent in the world. Mr. Keith, who is also a director of the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture, farms in Aberdeenshire, where be goes in both for dairying and stockbreeding.

Speaking to a Christchurch Press representative, Mr. Keith saiti: "I think, from what i have seen so far, that (lie farmers of the Dominion are quite up-to-date in tlfeTi' methods. I realise that the scarcity and expense of getting labor is the reason for a certain lack of neatness on many farms, but in the great essentials matter of fact, agricultural labor is not too ]i!eiitil'ul at Home, but 1 don't think that that scarcitv is the cause of a similar dearth out here. At Home, every farm has its cottages for married men, who, with their families, live on the place, thus keeping a reserve supply, so to speak, of labor to draw upon, but out here there is seldom accommodation for a nuu'l'ied.nian, and a large proportion of permanent hands on the place are single men. Your farm laborers out here are imported, not bred, but it is possible that these conditions will change as time goes on. I have been in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and J can safely say that the conditions in this country are decidedly more like those in Great Britain than in the two former places mentioned. 1 <lo not think the colonial farm litin.l works any better or any harder than :i farm hand in England" or Scotland, though there is a rather general impression that he does, but certainly his wages are a good deal higher."