The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 1932. THE CHANGING FARM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 185, 6 August 1932, Page 8

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

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 1932. THE CHANGING FARM.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, Ar.d the good that we can do.

The revolutionary changes that have taken place in farm life were dealt with a few days ago by a New Zealand manufacturer with nearly sixty years' experience in the making of agricultural machinery. To those who have lived long on the land Mr. Keir's reminiscences will bring the tang of a past that ivas materially different from to-day. It is difficult for the present generation to realise the conditions that obtained before the advent of the machine. Hay used to be cut with scythes, and before that with sickles, and spread and turned to dry by hand. .Haymaking and harvesting generally was eagerly looked forward to as a kind of picnic for the younger folk, and it was made the occasion for much romping and feasting. Thatching the stacks was done by experts who-took a pride in their work. In many parts of England the cows were milked in the fields by dairymaids with three-legged stools. William Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet, has left many vivid pictures of farm life under these conditions. Now we have tractors, milking machines, reapers and binders, and electric motors.

These mechanical devices have meant a large displacement of labour on farms, and they have called for a different type of labour. On the huge Gigant Farm of the Soviet 90 per cent of the workers are engineers engaged in attending to the tractors and other machines employed. It has been found in the United States that agriculture cannot absorb unemployment as it formerly did. Estimates of the Bureau of the Census show that the total farm population was about 30 per cent of the total population in 1920, and that it had declined to 25 per cent in 1925. The Hoover Committee reported that in ten years, since 1920, there had been a decline of 3,000,000 in farm population. Yet the farmers on about the same acreage as before had been able to produce 30 per cent more wheat, 4 per cent more cotton, 70 per cent more pork and lard, and 3'4 per cent more beef and veal. The agricultural worker was being forced into the towns. Tho nature of farming has been changed.

At the beginning of last century farms were, on the whole, isolated, self-sustaining communities. The essence of tho old agricultural system was production for use rather than for exchange of profit. The farmer believed in "laissez faire" and the natural laws of economics. The introduction of machine production and of crop specialisation engineered a revolution as vital as that of the steam engine. Production was for exchange and profit. Agriculture became dependent on distant markets and market-controlled prices. The exigencies of tho war demanded an enormous expansion of agricultural production, and in many cases farmers met the need for foodstuffs by expanding acreage. Land was bought and mortgaged at war prices. Then the demand for agricultural producc fell. The land could not be withdrawn from cultivation, and the result was over-production and a fall in land values. The plight of the primary producer has affected industry in general, and been a large factor in bringing about the present economic crisis. With the advent of the machine much of the charm of country life has departed, but with it has also departed much of the hard labour of old-time farming, and there* have entered many conveniences that would amaze our ancestors. In many fewer cases is it necessary to cut posts and rails from the tree trunks lying on tho farms, to say nothing of pit-sawing timber for building. The labour of the scythe and the churn has also disappeared. The countryside has lost much of its Arcadian simplicity, though this may sometimes have been more apparent than real, and the whirr of tho engine drowns the lowing of cattle. The farmer is caught in the struggle for markets and is the victim of world conditions. Mr. Keir thinks science has done much to lighten the labours of the farmer, but has put little into his pocket. The old hard conditions are largely gone, but with them lias gone also no small part of the individual character and determination that marked the pioneer. We have less and less in Nature that is ours, and this is a real loss. Farming, however, docs not differ in this respect from life generally. The world spins down the ringing grooves of change, and man has to adapt himself to the consequences of his own desire to seek out many inventions.