The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. SATURDAY, MAY 3, 1930. WHEN LAND "GOES BACK."

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 103, 3 May 1930, Page 8

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

SATURDAY, MAY 3, 1930. WHEN LAND "GOES BACK."

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistanct ( For the future in the distance, And the good that ice can do.

In this young country the farmer and the settler are constantly faced by the necessity for keeping up the care and cultivation of the soil to an adequate level, so as to prevent the land from relapsing into its primitive condition. But many people, even when they have attempted to work land for themselves, are liable to take a very limited view of this problem. To prevent land from "going back," in the sense of failing to increase or to maintain its productive capacity, much more is needed than the attempt to keep down blackberry or fern or bush undergrowth. The process of cultivation, even in a country with centuries of agricultural experience behind it, must be persistent and continuous; and Professor J. J. Findlay has recently declared that "if you once stop even for 'ten years the progress of a farm it will be a marvel if ycu can pull it round." The precise point of Professor Findlay's dictum is its application to the present condition of rural England; and on this subject some of his remarks are well worth quotation. He has visited Sweden and found there that "farming pays," and that the men and women "on the land" are for the most part prosperous and happy. The contrast between Sweden and Britain in these respects impels him to consider the underlying causes of the difference and he comes to the conclusion that the chief reason is the neglect to which farming land has been subjected in Britain during the past hundred years. "Drains made by prodigious labour have been left to silt up, so that pasture becomes swamp again; fences needing patient care season by season are left to grow rank and useless; then as crops diminish and prices fall and labour becomes scarce, gates, outhouses, even dwellings, are left to decay." These are the signs of relapse and deterioration that over large areas mark the British countryside. But they are not to be seen in Sweden, and Professor Findlay finds the ultimate cause in the Industrial Revolution which transformed Britain so completely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This transfer of the national capital and labour from the primary to the secondary industries was accomplished in Britain with remarkable rapidity and completeness. "When, our great-grandfathers found themselves suddenly getting rich with the aid of coal and steam and factories, they lost their sense of balance," and the result was the growth of the densely congested factory towns, the depopulation of the rural districts' and the relative neglect of the rural industries. And so to-day we witness the decay of agriculture, the devastation of the farm lands and the retrogression of the whole country toward that primitive, and relatively unproductive condition from which it had been raised by many centuries, of patient toil. It is possible that Professor Findlay's diagnosis of the state of the rural industries in Britain, is too pessimistic, but there is obvious wisdom in his warnings. He tells us that "capital in agriculture only accrues from the long-drawn, slow increment of the years and centuries, when sun and rain and human skill have done their work." He reminds us that the.wisest policy in any form of productive enterprise is "to put back into the business all that you can spare," and he assures us, with the force of solemn conviction, that "until the capitalist and manufacturer learn to put back into the soil of England the nourishment in capital and human energy that they have withdrawn therefrom they will continue to destroy the English stock at its roots." The conclusion may seem a little overdrawn, but no one can doubt the need for continuous care in the cultivation of the land, and for the systematic maintenance and periodic restoration of its productive capacity by every means within the cultivator's power. This is so plainly manifest that it needs no discussion, and the advice that Professor Findlay has offered to the people of England to prevent the soil from relapsing into sterility ; and impotence should appeal strongly to the man "on the land" in New Zealand to-day.