INTENSER CULTIVATION.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 284, 4 May 1914, Page 4

INTENSER CULTIVATION.

Referring to the possibilities in Sew Zealand, a contemporary points out that records of as much as £l5O per acre per annum arc being derived from market gardening in France, and from areas similarly devoted near Paris, no less than £240 per acre is annually received. Land in France is rented for as much as £27 an acre for simple onion growing, and Sir Rider Haggard, in his "Rural England," gives an instance of as much as £5760 being paid for 23 acres of land in the island of Jersey for potatogrowing—that is, £250 an acre. Sir Rider Haggard also says that good land suitable for fruit in England fetches £2OO an acre. The total value of vegetables, fruit, plants, etc., exported from Guernsey, in New Jersey, in one year was £1,115,000 (half of which was from potatoes). Aa 9SS4 acres only provided this wonderful harvest the average acreage return works out at £ll,l. Denmark and Belgium also obtain huge returns from small area cultivation. New Zealand offers many natural advantages for more intensive cultivation and stimulated production than is at present in vogue. A good climate, good soil, reliable rainfall, unci, in these days of cold storage and fast transit, within easy reach of great populations requiring vast supplies of food stuffs, would seem to indicate that there is a bright future before small area farming in the Dominion. The one difficulty likely to 'interpose would be the labor supply, but under a system of intensive cultivation the demand for outside help is not likely to be so great as at present. No doubt, as competition becomes kener and new markets are opened up, it will be found necessary to bring productiveness of the soil in New Zealand to the highest point of efficiency, and there are many lessons to be learned in this connection from the development of intensive cultivation in older countries.