FARMER’S CLUBS.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume I, Issue 22, 1 June 1867, Page 3

FARMER’S CLUBS.

(To the Editor of the Wairarapa Mercury.) Otaki, May 25, 1867.

Sir, —I had hoped when I saw that the subject of “ Farmer’s Clubs” was before the people of Wairarapa in your journal, that it would have been taken up by abler hands than mine and that it would soon have elicited general discussion and attention from a community which is so much concerned in the matter. But nothing so far as I know has been done. It seems now more necessary to blow up the smouldering embers (if indeed there ever lire) and to rouse your readers to a sense of the great need and” use of such institutions than to enter into the working details at any great length. I trust if lam plain spoken I shall not be thought sarcastic or hitter, but as having the welfare of the place at heart. _ Fanner’s Clubs in the valley are desirable to remove ignorance and conceit and carelessness, and these faults not only confined to matters of agriculture, but in most matters of life. It is by rubbing together in a common club that men remove from themselves much of these hindrances to success and honorable emulation. Most of your resident fanners are sadly afflicted with these faults. Poor men at home ; horn many of them, before the schoolmaster was so much abroad as he is now, who had no more experience than what they acquired from the farmer who had employed them from the tme hey were small boys; who had scarcely been out of their own parish before they came out; residents perhaps in some backward district (Cornwall and Devonshire have furnished many emigrants to this province), they find themselves out here in quite a novel position. They become owners of land which they never could have been at home, then they find the ditference between simply obeying orders and having to conceive plans' of their own. Their experience too of a farm at home does not serve them much; there they labored on land cultivated for centuries, and where the farmer’s chief object is to restore the exhausted productiveness of his land ; here, the land is in a stato of nature, and in the case of light lands, as fertile as you can ever make it. Here is the great temptation. Hard work, privation and self-denial recover a patch from the bush and crop after crop of the same thing exhaust, perhaps for ever, the resources of the laud. Others, seeing this result, give up agriculture and turn dairy-men and wool-growers on a small scale. Now the mischief of all this is that despite slovenliness and ignorance “ things pay.” And they may do so for a short time and it will be only a short time. What affords a man living now’ will not give a living to the large families now growing up so fast when they become men and -women and their fathers and mothers are old. You must produce more than von consume if you will support such a population as is rearing up in the Wairarapa. I need not prove this. It pays better at Wellington to buy chaff’ cut in Otago than to buy the rank stinking hay that is offered in the market as “ home produced.” It pays better at Wellington to buy flour grown in Chili or Adelaide and even “to cart it up from town ” to distant stations than to buy bad wheat, worse dressed, within a few miles. And this last fact demolishes, and it appears to me, the excuse so often made that the want of a railwav is the cause of all this do-nothing-ncss. Besides oats grown in Otago and Canterbury and sold in Dunedin and Christchurch at from 2s 6d to 3s Od are brought to those places, in most cases, by road and 1 should suppose quite as bad, or worse, roads than those here. The railway, no doubt, would be an enormous boon but instead of crying out like the carter who stuck in the mud for help anyother that of his muscles, your settlers leave off crying out for a railway, and plough and harrow and drill and reap by good machinery and the railway will come soon enough when there is more to carry. Again it is not very consistent in men who vaunt of self-reliance and “ caring for no one” to be willing to sit quietly until capital from England shall enable them to do what they are quite able, at least to try, to do for themselves. I know I touch on a point which is not often discussed and which is not fashionable hut if it be true it will have its weight in rousing those who have dreamed themselves to be very wide awake. Let men get together, let them dispel their old notions; though the scientific agricultural chemistry of Europe may as yet be unnecessary and really impracticable, yet let such things as the due rotation of crops, the due use of the manure which abounds, the proper grasses for pasture on various lands and some notion of what breeding is, he attained. Let not the hundreds of horses, good and bad (mostly very bad) be turned to no account hut plough land and cultivate crops on which better stock may be reared. Let not any weed of a thing anymore supply the place of a bull or horse. Let not half a crop be blown out on the ground because there is no means of harvesting it, still less let not that field he left till next year to produce a self-sown crop. It is time that we knew more and did more than our grandfathers whom we laugh at. There should he meetings called in various places to consider all this, a few simple rules should be made and let men enrol themselves in clubs with the aim to improve themselves and each other. Emulation and enterprise, though long dormant, will soon provide ways and means. In the meantime there are men of ability in your neighbourhood who I know will gladly help; correspondence will appear in your excellent journal, and not hing but good can come to those who honestly desire to help themselves and to leave their land better than they found it. I am, Sir, Your obedient servant, DAN DESBOIS.