F.J.A. two year plan

Alley, F. J. (Frederick James), Printed by Whitcombe and Tombs, Auckland, N.Z., 1935

His Majesty, King George, speaking at the World Economic Conference, June, 1933, said:—“lt cannot be beyond the power of man so to use the vast resources of the world to assure the material progress of civilization.”

In a world of “unemployment” in bitter contrast with the might of “discovery, invention, organisation,” he pleaded, “I appeal to you to co-operate for the ultimate good of the whole world.”

“This is an age of ‘Planning.’ Let us build a new Britain.” —His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales.

“Agriculture is still the greatest industry in our land, and of course infinitely the most vital.”

“There is a revolution in this world and we are in it. Our job in Britain is to do the job better than anyone else.”

He demands, “A reasonable level of subsistence and security for all our citizens.

“We are to go ahead to the NEW STATE, the Leisure State.

“There are 2,000,000 unemployed in this country the rest of the world has locked us out of the factories and locked us into the fields. You cannot expect people to walk up and down the fields and do nothing in them.”

Extracts from speeches of Mr. W. E. Elliot, British Minister of Agriculture.

How can the Old Agriculture, with its two days’ work in one ever secure “Leisure” for the majority of farmers or farm labourers ?

Place 2,(XX),000 unemployed on the land, individually, and the majority will fail badly. Placed collectively on Factory Farms, the majority will succeed, and the migratory workers can be transferred overseas to new groups, to create that much needed want, an increasing local demand for local products.

Kingsley Fairbridge, a South African Rhodes Scholar, founder of the Fairbridge Farm near Bunbury, Western Australia, touched to his heart’s core by the miseries of overcrowded city life, dreamed a dream that came true—

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The original publication details are as follows:

Title: F.J.A. two year plan

Author: Alley, F. J. (Frederick James)

Published: Printed by Whitcombe and Tombs, Auckland, N.Z., 1935

F.J.A. TWO YEAR PLAN

By F. J. ALLEY

I do not claim that my "Two-Year-Plan" will be a final panacea for unemployment and poverty, but it will carry us a long way by easy, natural, quicker stages towards the evolution of the truly economic State where no one except the loafer lacks the necessaries and refinements of a complete life. It will shorten working hours and increase holidays where there is strain or drudgery. It will make, the world over, education, art, travel, the natural heritage of millions of semislaves shackled too firmly to the land.

In the year 1918 in a little leaflet, "Land-ho," I advocated for some of our returned soldiers accustomed to GROUP life, "Large areas intensely farmed." "Little cities of refuge for returned soldiers accustomed to group life." "Tidy workers' homes round school and church and dairy factory."

I pleaded vainly that "A newnational policy must people the empty spaces and call into humming life the unborn rural communities, and indirectly the new great industrial centres of Xew Zealand."

Again in 1929 I wrote a booklet "Back to the Land! Now and How," urging all British countries to add to their land policies what I call "The New Agriculture," that is industrialised, mechanised, co-operative, intense, large-scale farming. Henry Ford in 1926 had the idea when he wrote these prophetic words :—"We shall see as great a development in farming during the next 20 years as we have in manufacturing during the last 20." He foretells the end of farm "drudgery," and the creation of many industries round the farm as a nucleus. He wrote : —"On my farm at Dearborn we do everything by machinery. We have eliminated a great number of wastes, but ut have not yet touched on real

economy. We have not yet been able to put in five or ten years of intense study. We have left more undone than we have done, yet at no time, no matter what the value of the crops, have we failed to turn a first class profit. We are not farmers. We are industrialists."

That king of farmers, John Grigg of historic Longbeach, Canterbury, .Yew Zealand, transformed 30,000 acres of swamp into a great industrialised farm. Here is a vivid picture of what an English visitor called "The best farm in the Empire," from the "Weekly Press," Christchurch, N.Z., February 13th, 1896.

"Harvest Scene:—'At 6.30 a.m. all the men about the homestead were seated at breakfast, and at 7 the manager issued necessary instructions, and men, drays and lorries, waggons and horses, made off in different directions in the most perfect order; some to work reapers and binders, others to stook and stack, others to attend the threshing mills, and others to perform the miscellaneous duties of high class farming on an extensive scale. The cook and his assistant were busily preparing for the next meal, the baker was drawing from the oven a savoury batch of bread, the butchers were cutting up sheep after sheep for the mid-day meal, the smith's hammer rang out clear and musical, carpenters, wheelwrights, and saddlers were busy at work, the mail coach was preparing to leave for Ashburton, the dairyman was finishing the morning's milking, the peculiar whirr of the cream separator was heard, and all Longbeach was full of animation. There was not the slightest sign of undue bustle or flurry, every man going away to his appointed work, everything betokening the most perfect discipline'."

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F.J.A. TWO YEAR PLAN

John Grigg proved that the farm factory, no less than the town factory, can function harmoniously, but its true value as a contribution to industrialised, intense, large - farming has never been realised by any farm economist.

bakers, school class-rooms, pretty church, rectory, hospital, pumping station for gravitation water supply, solid gravel roads lined with flower and vegetable gardens, orchards and clover fields, 39 cows provide a pint of milk daily, piggery, cricket and football grounds, - rowing boats which have to be trucked 17 miles to water in vacation time. "Amazing capacity for educational and reproductive work of these kiddies of '.-15 years of age." During the War "Fairbridge" offered to maintain necessitious war children for 4/- a week, an offer accepted by the State. ■racts from the "Daily Ni Perth, W.A., Dec. 11. 1931 i. I have not yet been able to ascertain to what extent the farm is self-sup-porting. It carries a big population and over-worked worried unemployment bodies ought to be saying. "If children 5-15 collectively can run' a farm, youths 15-20 can 'run' it faster. Matured men can do still better. Men. women, children combined, that is the Family, the greatest thing on our planet, can succeed best of all." "A group of men wholly intent upon getting work done have no difficulty in seeing that the work is done," write- a great industrial

Rider Haggard, himself a pour 500 acre farmer, in his book "Rural Denmark." year 1912. overflows with admiration of a 7.00(1 acre Danish farm on the Island of Falster. "No fancy place run by millionaires." a business returning £20,000 a year in profits; not overloaded with employees, yet employing 170 permanent labourers in as many cottages. besides some hundred casual labourers. In its combination of cleanliness, machinery. efficiency. "It was colossal: it was an agricultural revelation."

The same "cleanliness, order, modernity," in our Karmer Prince's I-'..P. ranch, Alberta, marks impressively "The New Agriculture": — "Electric light in the lowliest shed, individual bed-rooms for each man, hot and cold water, shower bath. built-in cupboards for clothes and food, dining hall," etc. Cannot the Empire follow the- good lead of its farmer Prince? In a speech at the Guildhall, London, be made a vigorous attack on slums:—"This is an age of planning and building. Let us build a new Britain and provide bouses worthy of the dignity and greatness of our race."

[n the same practical spirit he subscribes £1,0(1(1 to the "Kingsley Fairbridge" scheme of overseas child migration, a group scheme which has been in successful operation for about fourteen years. Epitomised and summarised this dream-come-true of a famous South African Rhodes' scholar speaks for itself: —3,200 acres of community farm, under good management, near Bunbury, Wesl Australia. In December, 1932, there were 330 boys and girls on the estate, ages 6-15. 392 had left for employment in the world outside. Tidy, buildings ol picturesque design, men's quarters, dining hall, kitchen, bakerj with boj

A lew miles from my home is Paparua Prison Farm, approximately 1,300 acre- A stony riverbed transformed into a valuable farm by prison labour and brains in management, splendid Corriedale sheep, hundreds of aeres of lucerne, "The King of fodders," a model vegetable garden, poultry farm, piggery. Cows too lazily full of g feed (early winter 1932, May to walk otit of my way. Not far oft the Sunnyside Mental Hospital, cheaply. efficiently, productively managed, shows fair profits. Ask each of the two managers this question: — How main free labourer* would you require to produce the same net profit? Divide this net profit by the number of families or workers and you find the simple quotient-wage per family or worker.

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A drive round I'aparua soon convinces a truth-seeker that production must have quadrupled itself in a. generation, and ii scientific new agriculture can do this, it can share the profits in increased wage-.

We are all so city-minded, so accustomed to craning our necks in sky-scraper worship, that we cannot vision the ennobling possibilities of refined country life, with many added domestic and minor industries dove-tailing into the gaps in agriculture. Man is largely a "club" animal, the herd instinct is still strong in him. The old agriculture ignores this racial fact. The New Agriculture will gather men into economic group- whose main prop is the land itself. The Old agriculture, like the old economic-, had iigaze fixed on the past and present, always facing the setting sun. whereas the New Agriculture, scientific, co-operative, mechanised. industrialised, optimistically confident, looks hopefully toward- the rising sun. The Farm Factory ithe missing younger brother of the town factory. The Industrial Revolution of the 18tb and 19th centuries, beneficial in some ways, created an "urban drift," and lias multiplied inventions without giving the displaced labourer a new or better job, while "rationalisation," "merger." "amalgamation." call the process what you please, is constantly throwing its victims on the unemployment slave market. To all such evicted workers, the industrialised re-organised large farm, a miniature City of Refuge, can offer a home and honest labour in rich variety.

The farm co-operators would ''take the bad year- with the good ones." In "an equitable scheme the workers will willingly take their full share of losses as well as profits with all the other ups and downs that occur." They would "bring the whole force of their mental and physical powers to the aid of the business, improve quality, increase quantity of output, and most important of all, keep a sharp eye on

any worker- who do not give >" their best efforts. The men who will not work would be sorted out from the willing anil dealt with, and the problem boldly faced of separating the employable from the unemployable."

Extracts from "The Industrial Situation in N.Z.," 1931. F. W. Rowley, Secretary of Labour, 19131929, pleading for co-partnership in industry. His conclusions apply particularly to my scheme of Cooperative Group Farming. Six miles east lies my native city, Christchurch, which in my lifetime lias grown from a village into a beautiful garden city with an urban and suburban population of approximately 13(1,(1(111 people, while northward, westward, southward stretches a line plain, the future home of millions, but now maintaining outside the mother city a paltry 100,000. My lovely city has its 9,000 empty stomachs, and probably as many ball-filled, while a crowd of philanthropists, adepts in the art of begleave no idle coin in one's pocket. "Why all this unemployment,'" ask- a Japanese wool buyer. "So few people, so much land. Why don't you farm it?" But the conservative farmers, freehold, leasehold, mortgage bold, many of the last emerging from the stranglehold of highly priced land to a sad state of no-hold, per-i-t with fatal obstinacy in following the urban drift to a dead past. Consequently, Tory farmer's backward gaze uniting in unholy wedlock with the cramped brick-and-concrete upward -trained vision of the townsman, beget this hybrid curse unemployment.

President Roosevelt, in his inaugural address, saw. "We must reorganise the overbalance of population in our industrial centres, and by engaging on a national scale, in re-distribution, endeavour to provide for a better use of our lands for those best fitted for the land." He stresses the need, but does not clearly the way. He has hundreds of thousands of men busy at

F.J.A. TWO YEAR PL \X

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afforestation, where the returns are a generation distant. It would be a simple matter to transfer these forester campers to permanent Group Settlements on the abandoned or deteriorated tens of millions of acres of America's idle lands.

Western European nations, and Australian states, who ought to be in the van of this great new movement, all seem visionless and haltingly retrospective. Mussolini remarks, "It is either the dole or public works." He ought to have said, "Public works as often as they are needed. Public Farm Works in perpetuity." This suggested No. 3 Marine Drive when completed will repeat what Xos. 1 and 2 did—turn its road-makers into road wanderers on the rough, dusty, modern highway "Unemployment," where they can wear out meagre shoe leather in chasing elusive jobs. Public works are necessary and are sometimes revenue producing, whereas the Industrialised Co-operative Farm soon pays for itself, does not cast its labourers adrift, soon pays interest on capital expenses, amortises, if asked, by a Sinking Fund in 20 or 30 years its initial becomes a Perpetual Gold Mine richer than all the gold in New Zealand. The real miracle is in the ten thousand years of golden wheat, and not in a mere gold mine, which yields but one harvest however rich.

Xow suppose that the thousands of pounds sunk in our "Marine Drives" had been spent in the purchase of a large farm, stock, buildings, machinery, equipment in full, first cost only cost, the workers would complete each task with a happy well-done satisfied feeling, and the certainty of a job tomorrow. Whoever heard of a farm where there was no work that wanted doing? The organisation, too, is such a simple matter in a country devoted to organised sport, organised churches and institutions. organised industries of every size, organised municipal services and utilities. Dunedin, in many ways a model city, makes a handsome profit

on her few ventures: —Newspaper report:—i3B,ooo half-yearly profit, year 19.31, a trifling loss of a fewhundred pounds on tram services. Mud flats are now covered by factories; good engineering and dredging have brought the harbour into the city. The enterprising brains that conceived and carried out these admirable schemes could at much less cost and trouble find managers for group farms on plains and in valleys beyond the hills.

The Industrialised Large Farm can be governed by—

1) By the State wholly

(2) By the City, County or Prov ince.

(3) By the Church or educational body provided always national interests and welfare are safeguarded.

(4) By the individual capable farmer alone who pays fair wages and whose employees are comfortably housed and kindly treated.

This type: Manager "More money is paid in wages on this farm than on any farm I know." Bo» "And more 'stuff' goes off and walks off this farm than from any farm of similar size that I know."

Procedure. No hard and fast rules need be made, but Canterbury would not ask help, or interference, from bureaucratic institutions hundreds of miles away. Cool breezy Southland could organise Iter end of the Island. Sub-tropical Auckland knows best her own climate and conditions.

Suppose that instead of creating expensive Boards in our Capital City we appoint with the advice of competent judges, parliamentary and industrial, an honorary committee of three managers, a simple Land Selection and Farmers' Selection Board. These could keep in touch with the Valuation and State Land Departments of each agricultural centre. From many scores of applicants a suitable Farm Manager is appointed. With his advice a good second-in-command is added. These

FJ.A. TWO YEAR PLAN

five select a farm not too large to be cumbrous, not too small to be wasteful in the working. Unemployment money wasted on unproductive or semi-productive works now buys a wealth-producing farm, and labourers, free labourers, farmers, a carpenter or two. a mechanic or blacksmith, cow men, sheep men, handy men, are selected by the Board with the Manager always consulted (his teami according to man-carrying, money-producing capacity of the farm.

Sustenance money on a diminishing scale is paid only for a limited time, not exceeding 18 months.

Like all good farmers the cooperative farm team will be good sports from manager downward, to average the good years with the bad, and take as wages the net profits.

The land, buildings, stock, machinery, equipment are provided by the Government from the millions of unemployment revenue.

Interest, say 3 per cent, for 5 years, 4 per cent, afterwards. Denmark in her small-hold scheme charged rates as low. N.Z. can do as liberally.

Rates and taxes, if any, would have to be paid.

A superannuation scheme subsidised at the start by the State, could provide for old age.

Types of Farms, not CAMPS.

1. For orphans, "waifs and strays" on the model of the Fairbridge Farm, West Australia. A school community, self-supporting, or nearly so.

2. For boys or girls, or both combined, in their "teens," with a few . teachers who carry forward adolescent education for a few years: wages of youths necessarily low, hut self supporting, on the model of "Flock House" or The Smedley Training Farm for boys, both highly successful institutions.

3. An offshoot from 2 for older youths, increased wages. Some would leave for ordinary employ-

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ment. The remainder either develop new hamlets or fit into scheme 4.

4. Families in artistic cottages "town planned." A hamlet nestling among trees, shrubs, pergolas. All these 4 or more schemes would aim at a combination of flowers, gardens, orchards, forests, buildings, workshops, utility combined with beauty, stars in the constellation. "New Agriculture."

The poultry section at almost a day's notice supplies fresh eggs. The cows arc a good second with fresh milk and butter, fresh vegetables a welcome third, young beef, pork, bacon home produced are only six months' distant. The sheep give their contribution in six or nine months according to the season. Wheat and oat crops promise bread and oatmeal. In less than two years almost every kind of vegetable and animal food will be in full supply. My Two Years Plan in full operation, all surplus beyond rent, maintenance, rates, taxes if any, being paid to the workers, who will be heartened by the prospect of a fine community orchard and the long miles of plantations and trees flanking the windward sides.

Mr. Lloyd George, great organiser of our England, during the world war, downs "politics" and becomes "a registered potato grower" on his Surrey farm of 240 acres, employing 31 men. He seems prouder of his prizes for honey, currants and apples than of his worldwide reputation as an organiser of victory. Unknown to himself he ushers in the "New Agriculture." His NEW IDEA in actual operation may prove of more value than all the proposals of his "NEW DEAL." Mr. W. E. Elliot, Minister fo Agriculture, speaks hopefully of a "newera," "a leisure state," "idealism," "comradeship," but before the mountains of poverty and unemployment are scaled, and the "Promised Land" is won. the "Old Agriculture" hoary with age, must feel the supporting hand-grip of the New Agriculture, scientific, economised, industrialised, mechanised, co-operative.

F.J.A. TWO YEAR PLAN

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workers of England by the enclosures of tlie 18th and 19th centuries, but the "restoration" must be in a modern scientific form. It appeals strongly to spirited men and youth who love big fields and crop-, long miles of trees, great (lock- and herds, and machinery on a grand scale. It believes in a spreading out rather than in a towering up.

Some countries, Denmark in particular, have gone a long way in co-operative butter and bacon factories, organised marketing, organisation in many way-. We see in her hundred thousand small farms the End of an Era, the recognition of an economic 20th century fact, that the small farm is not the final achievement in agriculture. 1 scale, co-operative production, with allied industries, the cheapest, most economical form of land settlement, marks the new age in Agriculture. In the X.Z. Journal of Agriculture. October, 1917. Mr. W. D. Hunt, now Sir William, outlined a scheme for "the profitable use of 50 per cent, additional labour on our farms." He wrote. "An additional labourer placed on a farm will increase production just as much as an additional settler placed on a section and working it himself. The married labourer can be supplied by a capital outlay of £4OO. The settler requires a capital of £4,500."

In Sept., 1931, Mr. Mimro, M.P.. asserted in Parliament that the average cost of land settlement per holding was £2,700.

The 18 millions sunk in Canberra and Sydney Bridge would have placed 30,000 families in permanent hamlets.

Shortage of MAX POWER ringthe death knell of "White Australia."

The Xew Agriculture creates and maintains a rural drift.

It sets emigration in motion, and fills the empty continent, Australia, with the best selected emigrants from other lands. A planned holiday system could make easy the luxury of a visit "Home." Emigration in our little world need not be banishment, provided we organise.

It may be true that the New Agriculture will wear out more tools, implements and machinery, but less will rust out.

It makes large-scale farming truly intensive.

It averts that shameful deterioration of the land to be seen in many countries.

It believes in the Long-Life Farm, the not-to-be-sold farm, the come-to-stay farm.

It transforms the large farm into a Farm Factory, with division of labour, and the resultant rest, holidays, recreation for workers.

It places the farm factory on level with the town factory.

It widens the scope of forestry and restores the world's vanishing timber supplies.

It restore- to the descendants of the common people the millions of acres of "Commons" torn from the

It offers opportunities for leadership, and creates happy hunting grounds for the thousands of scientists our agricultural colleges are turning out. and while doing so it need not interfere with the smallhold systems of China. Denmark or Xew Zealand.

The small farmer can exist outside the P'arm Factory just as the industrial boot or cycle repairer still holds his own outside the large boot or car factory.

Why should we not utilise on a large scale in agriculture the spirit of comradeship so evident on board ship or in a city factory or business where team-work is good, where everybody is working for everybody?

The Farm Factory arrests the decline of agriculture and ennobles rural life by banishing loneliness and isolation.

It is based Oil the home and the hamlet.

It is the simplest, mo.-t economical method of solving the unemployment

F.I.A. TWO YEAR PLAX

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BUT on the liquid, paid for assets, goods, in the Farm Factory stores; that is. the grocery, drapery, foods of all kinds, manufactured articles, the raw materials of which are paid for.

problem. Vegetables, crops, trees GROW; Nature helps man. In manufacturing industry the work -top- when the worker stops.

It offers a wide variety oi work, horticultural, agricultural, mechanindustrial. Xo dole. Xo charity. As in Henry Ford's bigEactory, the partial cripples, the weak, the valuable careful es ienced older labourers can all find places with suitable work, whereas on the one-man farm the farmer must be an all-round, fit man. capable in a great number of jobs.

Every man and youth in tin operative farm must realise that his wages depend on the farm's net results.

Its accounting and bookkeeping can be simple: a five minutes daily record of transactions, an hour s monthly entry, a few hours for the annual balance sheet.

It would be the manager's duty to maintain always a safe reserve of liquid wealth, goods-in-demand, over and above the wages-credits issued, -.' as to ensure reada convertibility of wages into goods, Qpeques, orders in return for labour credits, in large or small amounts, could also be issued, if required, as local additional money, so that true credit- would exchange for anything in stock from a pound of butter to a re-conditioned gig or car.

There can be honest "Competition," healthy rivalry between the various hamlet- to -ee which can in the quickest time become self-sup-porting and which can show the highest per capita wage, also a friendly rivalry among the various -ections of the farm to keep down - and make high profits. The iated co-operative groups can combine to buy cheaply in bulk.

In my fruitful Canterbury Plains the Farm Factory would provide every kind of animal food, mutton. beef, pork, bacon, poultry and eggs; the great cereals wheat for bread for oatmeal: every kind of vegetable food: in a few years fruit in abundance; cheaper fuel: trees in ipect; the simpler article- oi furniture. To conclude, more than 50 per cent, of the primary needs It would sell enough stock or produce to buy the commodities il not grow or make. Its industries would tend to expand, its population to increase, a sure check to rura depopulation.

The co-operator would be sure of the BIG THREE—

1. HOUSING

2. FOOD

3. CLOTH IXC.

In exchange for labour credits. iiours, weeks, or months, the Farm Factory could have its own simple money system. It could issue orders l'or goods in varying amounts on a simple system of credit wage- for Is in much the same way as the big firms exchange their merchandise with their client farmerssimple debit and credit entries.

XOT on the Farm, which belongto New Zealand.

XOT on the buildings, implements, machinery, which are fixed capital not to be sold.

XOT on the main part live stock returns, or crops, which are ear-marked for wages, rent, maintenance, taxes, rates.

He would have a HOME among "homes" of the HAMLET. With the magnet "Home" the kind old Mother Karth can always draw the lonely ones to her grand maternal heart.

The effect of a re-grouping of urban and rural workers would be a perpetual motion see-saw between town and country with transport booming on model highways and railways, a rural drift if any drift, since the country, that is the

F.J.A. TWO YEAR PLAN

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open lands, occupy the greater space, a grand fraternity of town and country, a widening fraternity of nations.

Scotland, under a nobler clan system, and led by the chiefs of agriculture, re-peoples her glens with farmers, foresters and shepherds, with also a proportion of handy men and artisans, all combining the solid virtues of "Bonnie Scotland" with the science of the New Agriculture, which in the words of Miss Jessie Mackay, a talented New Zealander, will "save Scotland from the inevitable doom of becoming one huge playground for English lords and American plutocrats."

Canada conquers the isolation of her wide prairies by a corporate village life, where her farmers can dance winter away, most of their stock snugly housed in the huge byres of the community farm.

Australia turns her splendid sunbrowned manhood on to her drought-stricken plains, science and courage ever encroaching on the sandy wastes.

Was there ever such a heritage given tor the mere occupying- An island continent nearly half-way round the world from Britain, with a climate ranging from warm temperate to tropical, yielding every fruit and cereal, sustaining every kind of domestic animal life, abounding in mineral wealth, a second United States in its childhood, the possible future home of a hundred million people. English in

speech, a composite race, the selected best of the best nations! Double and treble her meagre population of less than seven millions, and neither Tyneside nor Clydeside will lack orders, and the hum of transport, aerial and marine, will echo over three oceans. At present owing to effete land tenures, urbanisation, and political catchcries, Australia lias become the DANGER SPOT of the Empire, and her international population weather glass points to foul weather.

Because Edward Gibbon Wakefield and other pioneers of colonisation looking from the Malvern Hills across Old England saw in clear prospect New Englands arise, as by magic, in Canada, Australia, and Xew Zealand, two generations of my kinsfolk followed the long ocean trail to Xew Zealand, and I see two younger generations ahead of me. Meditating on a spur of my native hillside, above my native city, I watch, forty miles away sunshine and shadow play over new Malvern Hills, buttressed by my grand Alps, and the shadow of a doubt crosses my mind, for in contrast with the progress of Russia or Japan, AngloSaxondom, always including great America, travels at a snail's pace. Again the urgent question rises, "Will my two young generations and their descendants 'inherit the land forever'?" The XEW AGRICULTURE, afire with new energy, solving at one stroke the double problem of unemployment and migration, ought to answer with an emphatic YES !

F. J. ALLEY,

Upper Riccarton

Christchurch, N.Z

PRINTED BY WHITCOMBS Bk TOMBS LIMITED—42913

F.J.A. TWO YEAR PLAN

England has money in plenty, a surplus population, emigrants asking to go aboard ship. Overseas, are vast empty spaces calling for the plough, the road, the workshop, the in-door factory, and the FARM FACTORY. Everything is ready except the will to victory. The Promised Land is to be won by the mere occupying. No one is to be evicted. Provided only our rulers will open their eyes and see, the greatest and most peaceful invasion in the history of colonization can begin this very year its march of triumph.

It took the mother land more than 80 years to discover that agriculture was her most important industry. The farmer-novelist, Rider Haggard, in his book “Rural Denmark,” wrote: “We British farmers could produce in addition every pound of butter, every side of bacon, every egg that the Danes now deliver to our shores—yes, and twice as much.”

Twenty years later Mr. W. Elliot is “planning” to prove R.H.’s prophecy; proof also that the novelist had a truer vision than the statesmen of his day.

My own country, New Zealand, is wasting precious years in a vain effort to solve the unemployment problem by a “Small Farms Scheme.” A pathetic return to the “Two acres of Land and a Cow” ideal, very Chinese indeed!

If New Zealand and Britain will spend one half of the “dole,” “sustenance,” and unproductive millions, now irretrievably lost, on productive FARM FACTORY agriculture, the end of the unemployment will be in sight.