The Land You Live On

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 938, 2 August 1957, Page 6

The Land You Live On

AFE we New Zealanders too smug about our achievements as farmers? Can we afford to be smug at all? Are we really making the best use of our land? What could, and should, we do to increase production? With one eye on this year’s General Election and the need to think intelligently about land policy, and the other on the problem of feeding another 1,000,000 New Zealanders by 1975, a new series of popular, down-to-earth talks with the general title, Wanted-A Land Policy, will diseuss these and other related questions during the next few months. In every branch of our national life we can generally learn something about our present problems by taking a critical look at their past-land policy is certainly no exception. How many of us, for example, know how our present system of land tenure developed? And are we satisfied even now that it has reached a satisfactory finality? Or, again, there’s the problem of our farming cost structure. We haven’t yet found how to reduce it to manageable proportions, but since it has proved so great a barrier perhaps we should try again. These are only two of the problems W. J. Gardmer examines in the first talk of the series, a critical. history of farming in New Zealand. Among the more lively

current issues he discusses is our heavy reliance on the British market. Mr Gardner is Lecturer in History at Canterbury University College. There is no reason, if you look at the advantages we enjoy, why we should not be a nation of good farmers, Professor L. W. McCaskill, of Linco College, puts a pin into the bubbles of

our complacency when right at the start of his talk on the use we make of the land he declares that we are not doing nearly well enough. The task ahead as he sees it is not only to feed another 1,000,000 people by 1975, but to give them a standard of living equal’ to the one we enjoy today. To do that we must our beef and dairy cattle by

hundreds of thousands each, and our sheep population by many millions. More important, we’ll need something like 27,000 more workers on the land to look after all those extra animals. |The extra stock can be carried only if

we increase the carrying capacity of land already occupied or bring new land into production. "The sensible thing," says Professor McCaskill, "is to do both." And what about manpower? An increase of 23 per cent in farm production betweén 1939 and 1950 while 9000 farm workers of one kind and another were going off the land is partly explained by mechanisation-for one thing, 25,000 more tractors. But isn’t it possible that we might have done a bit better to spend a little less on mechanisation and a little more on extra labour-on huts for single men and houses for married? Professor McCaskill, at any rate, thinks we would be better off socially and economically if we did have more workers on the land, and he devotes a separate talk .to the manpower question. One blunt question he asks is: Why don’t farmers do more to train workers for the land since they are so willing to use those that others train for them-at the Department of Agriculture training school at Flock House, for instance? And when farmers get good workers, do they. do enough to keep them? New Zealand’s extra 1,000,000 people in 1975 will not only need more land and people growing more food. According. to town planning experts our towns will occupy 90,000 acres more than they do now if we insist on living eight people to the acre as at present, and it’s likely that much of that new urban land will be good land-because good farm land is usually good building land. In a talk on this aspect of land policy, Nancy Northcroft, Regional Planning Officer, Christchurch, argues that a change in the design of our towns will mean not only a saving in land of up to 80,000 acres, but a big saving in the cost of services-and therefore in rates. Ownership of land involves responsibilities to society as a whole, says Professor "McCaskill in a final talk which looks to the future. The main responsibility is that each acre should be farméd to produce as much as it can so long as the soil is conserved. But if all the existing farmers worked their existing farms as well as they are able they would still not solve the production problem New Zealand will face in the next 20 years. What then must be done? Should existing farms be cut up if it could be shown it would be economic? Should there be intensified land development to bring new land into production? Drawing on such examples as irrigation in Canterbury on the one hand and the development of new farmlands near Lake Te Anau on the other, Professor McCaskill proceeds to examine these two possibilities. One strong plea is for young men on the land. We must be fair to the ageing farmer after his years of exertion, he says, but if we could replace him by a young, keen, efficient man we would certainly increase production. Wanted-A Land Policy will start from 4YA and 4YZ at 7.15 p.m. on Wednesday, August 7, and from 2YA at 7.13 p.m. on Thursday, August 8. Later it will be heard from other YA stations,