GOOD FARMING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 June 1938, Page 9

GOOD FARMING

"DOING WELL BY THE SOIL." The other night when returning from a farmer's gathering, in the dusk. I heard the remark, without seeing the source of it, "Ah, it may be good business —but it isn't good farming.” writes “W.J.8." in the "Birmingham Post." It is as refreshing as a breath from the south-west to all of us when-

ever we meet someone putting resolutely on one side the bait of immediate material gain from a sense of craft-pride or duty to a tradition. It is an enheartening affirmation of hidden worth in us and in some of our human callings. It corrects that desolating surplus of talk of money-values, and shows a leaven of people who draw the line and will not be bullied by the obvious coarser standards. The mark of the fine craftsman is scruple about the means employed to obtain any effect. To him it is nothing to the point that results almost as good superficially may be got by some slick short cut. Easy trick methods are to him anathema. That fragment of conversation in the night recalled to me the memory of a loyal landworker who, in painfully difficult years, lived almost like a pauper sooner than commit the agricultural crime of selling hay or barnyard manure from his holding to tide him over. What! rob his land of its heart and fertility? Sooner rob himself of food and simple pleasures. It was not mere traditionalism which he accepted but did not-understand; nor was it the upshot of conscious scientific calculation about residual values. It was a burning sense of equity, an instinct for “doing fair by the land.” He must, he feels, put more good into the farm than he sends off it. He must leave it richer than he found it. His own livelihood —this is his faith, not demonstration —will be provided meanwhile; on the ancient principle that if you do right by your environment and seek first things first, “all other things shall be added unto you”—in the long run; not obviously, nor at once, but indirectly, and after patience has had its perfect scope. Let us- make no mistake about it. Every acre of England that has any fame for richness and growingpower is the slowly-won result of generations of nameless men “doing well by the soil.”