THE GREAT WHEAT LANDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 2, 3 January 1925, Page 4

THE GREAT WHEAT LANDS.

(To the Editor.) Sir,—l have just spent three years on the prairie of Saskatchewan dealing with wheat farmers, and know their conditions. The average cost to grow a bushel of wheat, not including the farmer's personal labour, is about SO cents, and I have known not a few farmers to net 05 cents in the fall. After the hard, grinding toil of the spring and fall rush this is poor consolation. The steam engine which drives the threshing outfit is generally started at four o'clock in the morning, and, except for breakdowns, goes continually until 8 and i) o'clock at night. This continues at least for two months. Some farms are 15 or 25 miles from a rail depot, where are the grain elevators, and during the long winter months farmers haul their wheat sleigh load by sleigh load, slowly marketing the produce for which they have worked all the summer long, and then barely making a profit, if any. It is these long winter drives, often made in zero weather, with a biting wind, and tbe noses of horses frozen, to say nothing of their own frost bites, that test the endurance of the Western Canadian farmer. Small wonder then that the farmers talk and live for nothing else, it seems, than the grade and price of wheat. If something could only be done to ensure a universal price of wheat, this, then, would be a consolation for all these hardships and anxieties.—l am, etc., R. E. HALLIGAN.