Vegetables by the Million

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 232, 3 December 1943, Page 6

Vegetables by the Million

j OU may or may not think that gardening is best left to gardeners, but if you wanted a million pounds of vegetables before next winter, you might hesitate to trust the spade and the hoe. The Government hesitated at this time last year. It called on the Fields Division of the Department of Agriculture, and the Department called on the machine. The result in 10 months was 1,060,000 pounds weight of firstgrade peas, beans, cabbages, etc., from 112 acres of land. Certainly the land was good-10 to 15 feet of river silt on a bed of shingle. The. locality was convenient-Grey-town, which has railway links with the biggest groups of consumers. The climate can be good, and last year wasthough this planting season has been the wettest local residents can remember. The market was certain ‘and measurable-so far as anything remains in in war. Labour was made availjie from an unexpected source. There 4was luck in the choice of the staff. Experience Scoffed For the "experienced" did not doubt, or hesitate to say, that it was looking for trouble to hand over a job of this size to departmental officials. The supervisor selected for the farm was admittediv a man of ability-a Master

of Agriculture from Massey College, who had worked in _ the Fields Division. Excellent, the wise ones said, if the job had been to talk to farmers. But the job in this case was to talk to the stubborn earth — to persuade it to produce more green stuff in a few months than it had ever produced before; and only gardening experts could do that. Well, the wise ones were wrong. The land Was taken over in August, 1942, and was all in production by the end of summer. Twenty-three different varieties of crops were grown, and the result at the end of 10 months was the amazing figure we have already quoted-

1,060,000 pounds of first-grade vegetables from a farm that might otherwise have carried 50 cows. Oh, yes, you say-but the cost! Well, the cost was 27 per cent less than the the return even on the ridiculously low valuation allowed as an all-over delivery price. It Sounded Unreal It sounded unreal when we heard it, so we accepted an invitation from Dr. I. D. Blair, Assistant-Superintendent : of Vegetable Production for the Services, to spend a day at Greytown talking .to the staff and getting a first-hand impression. It was a fine day, and there was not much that we did not see, but we shall not pretend that we spoke with all the 60 men and women we found.at work, Two-thirds of them did not.speak English, and were accompanied by armed guards as they worked. In most cases, they seemed to be working cheerfully, but they could hardly be called first-grade labour, even when allowance was made for their language difficulties. On some jobs, the supervisor told us,two or three of them would do as much as one good New Zealand worker, but in other cases, their efficiency was as low as onesfifth or one-sixth of the. New Zealand standard. For example, a really expert New Zealander has been known to plant 10,000 cabbages in a day. A

good average New Zealand worker will plant 4000 to 5000. The figure for these special labourers is about 600. Working Without Interest We watched a dozen of them putting in a tile drain, and thought they worked about as hard as men ever work when they have neither a personal nor a material interest in what they are doing; ourselves in an unemployment camp, for example. We should think that they did about as much in a day as New Zealanders at present do = Germany. At the same time, the s visor told me, most of them garden work to the work they would be doing if they were not selected’ for vegetable growing. While it»-was not clear that they had done such work before-they remained reticent about the past-it was clear that they ‘liked getting out into the open and working among growing things. Their interest in flowers-any kind of flower-was ‘half ludicrous and half pathetic. Onée when they were about to be returned to camp one man was found to be hiding a whole dandelion inside his tunic, root and all. Another was seen one day with a blue lupin, carefully extracted for replanting. An issue of cherry blossom sprays (through the: kindness of +a local resident), was deeply appreciated; but the big hour came when someone presented enough chrysanthemum roots to go round a whole working party.. When

we were watching the ditch-diggers we saw one go suddenly very intent, and with great care retrieve a bird’s egg from the soil. There was the case also of the man who found a rabbit’s burrow and very tenderly carried off the young ones-not to be eaten, we were assured, but to be kept as pets. There was satisfaction in seeing these workers treated as the parents of New Zealand prisoners would like to have their sons treated in Japan and Germany. Meanwhile, they are helping in the production of vegetables on an organised scale to meet the great shortage brought about by the war. While there (continued on next page)

WHAT AMATEURS CAN DOWHEN THEY TRY

(continued from previous page) are some jobs that they can’t do at all, and some that it is not worth giving them to do because of the amount of. supervision required — pea-picking, for example — their assistance means a good dealin the aggregate. Mechanisation Apart from them, the present working staff on this farm is 20 Europeans17.men, two women and one boy. But the amount of hand-work done is reduced. to a minimum. It is a mechanised farm; and while it is necessary to plant out by hand, cultivation before

sowing and planting, and even harvesting in some cases-taking up root crops, for example-is by power-driven or power-pulled machines. One interesting development this season has been the extension of the nursery. Instead of buying plants, the farm grows them from seed, and it will give some idea of the extent of this work to point out that the requirements this year are 500,000 plants. The staff have, in fact, become such enthusiastic nurserymen that they . have of their own initiative, provided shelter and wind-breaks for the nursery, shelves for the seed-boxes and a loading platform for the lorries, Man Proposes With operations on such an extensive scale, it has not always been possible to avoid miscalculations. In a few cases, not very many, crops have been produced in excess of the demand. In some cases, the demand has been greater than

the supply. After all, it is war produc-tion-as definitely as the manufacture of clothing and munitions. And the only certainty in war is uncertainty. If 10,000 men require 100,000 cabbages, say, but for military reasons are moved away | before the cabbages arrive, there is disorganisation, and there may be waste. There has been some waste at Greytown; but it has been on such a small scale, such an insignificant scale in relation to the operations as a whole, that it probably gives a false impression e¥en to mention it. Nor is it necessary to point out to anyone who has ever grown vegetables on any scale at all that the weather can play tricks which cannot |

be guarded against. If, for example, an acre of tomatoes are just beginning to ripen, and an estimate of quantities available is given for two or three weeks ahead, a succession of dry, hot days will throw the whole estimate out of gear one way, and a cold snap upset it another way. And what applies to tomatoes applies to peas, beans, pumpkins, and many other crops-but particularly to a crop of broccoli. Production must always be by guess and by God to some extent in a country in which the weather is unpredictable. All Amateurs It is, perhaps, one of the most interesting features of this whole experiment that it has been carried to success by amateurs. From_ the supervisor down, the only experience most of the staff could claim when they started was kitchen garden experience — growing enoygh vegetables for one household. So New Zealanders. are either very adaptable or they learn far more than they realise when they think they are only amusing themselves.