SYDNEY.

Bush Advocate, Volume XXI, Issue 300, 23 June 1909, Page 7

SYDNEY.

[own correspondent.] INTENSE CULTIVATION. Our irrigation experts are now telling us, what commonsense might have* told us all along, that irrigation can only he expected to succeed thoroughly when it is united with intense cultivation. Intense cultivation means strenuous and well applied labor applied to a comparatively small plot of ground. An acre under intense cultivation will require more labor thapi the ordinary settler would apply to bis "living area," and probably more than the pastoralist -would apply to a tract of thousands, of acres. EARTH HUNGER. Theoretically, intense cultivation presents to perplexed Ministers for Lands a Avay out of their difficulties. They can say to the crowds who beseigo them, "AVhy, gentlemen, each of you wants as much land as would support a score of families; take less land and cultivate it better." But he -would find very, littlo response. Australian agriculture, in the main, aims at skimming the cream off large tracts of land, rather than in the sedulous unremitting care which is necessary to get the best results .' from every rood held. Still, overy- • thing must have a beginning, and in . its beginning necessarily seems small > and feeble. There is vitality, how- [ ever, in this idea, of intense cultiva- > tion. It will certainly grow, and in tho future it will assume proportions liithei-to uiulre'amed ot'.