Farming If You Like It

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 171, 2 October 1942, Page 3

Farming If You Like It

E have received for review \X/ a pamphlet* on the future of farming, written by Professor E. R. Hudson, Director of Canterbury Agricultural College. It costs only sixpence, and runs to only sixteen octavo pages, but it may easily mark a turning point in our agricultural history. It is not forgetting any of Professor Hudson’s predecessors-all those whose work, thoughts, agitations, and dreams have helped to bring him to his present position — not forgetting the humblest of them to say that he has probably now started a revolution; that his pamphlet ends one era and starts another; since it offers an alternative to freehold that free farmers will be able to accept, and an escape from the two evils of lack of capital and lack of capacity that, taken together, threaten both our peace and our prosperity. Professor Hudson is not a politician. He is a farmer. He preaches neither socialism nor capitalism, communism nor fascism. He preaches the land and its most effective use; the life of the country in all its richness and fullness. But like Sir Daniel Hall in Britain he thinks that the State must own the land for its most effective use. So he proposes land nationalisation with a "rational system of freehold," knowing, the moment he sets this down, that there will be howls of protest, but feeling in his bones that there is no other way. On the other hand he is not rash enough to suppose that this rational system of tenure can be. reached in a professor’s study. It must be tried out over a period of years behind the plough and among the cows and sheep. It must make the farmer sure of his farm as long as he works it efficiently, give the landless lad a chance when he has proved himself the right type, protect the community at large from land booms, land sharks, and land waste. Professor Hudeon is not eure that |

his plan in practice will achieve all these ends, so he advises caution and offers alternatives, But he knows that the present system must be changed, and he says so at a most opportune time-when the whole world is uneasy and confused but most people still feel vaguely that security begins with the soil. *The Future of Farming. By E. R. Hudson. Reconstruction Series, No. 6.