CORRESPONDENCE.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LX, Issue 10831, 1 April 1932, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

(To the Editor.) Sir, -I notice in your issue of last Tuesdav a report in which Mr E. C. Levvey.’ S.M., is stated as saying, in response to a farm defendant’s declaration that "We must live," that living expenses on farms-where meat, vegetables, etc., could be grown, must be very small and the only necessities needed from outside were bread, tea and sugar. If "eating" were all that has to he comprised by the word "living,” this might be true, and we might complete. Mr Levvey’s picture of farm life by imagining the farmer and his family without clothes and spending the. nights under the stars in the same way as his cows. _ I should like to point out that if a fanner need not he starved off his farm he can be, and is, pushed off it by excessive demands made from outside on his diminished income. Mr Lower, for one thing.* has forgotten the item of clothes. If wo can disregard the farmer’s Sunday suit for the moment—-which on the average he may he able to replace once in five years —we have the items of working boots, work shirts, denims and socks, which have to be worn even* day and have an inconvenient habit of rapidly wearing out. Any farmer’s wife will corroborate tins, who continually has to find something or other to wear for herself and family. Further. Mr Levvey seems to have forgotten that farmers, like town folk, need a roof over their heads, and if rent is not actually payable on it. mortgage interest usually is, and that is a very solid sum to take off a slump income. too, whether fire, life or employers' liability, can hardly be excluded under the 'heading of necessary living expenses. Again County Councils have a. most obnoxious habit of demandingrates, another large and rigid amount which if not paid up sooner or later, entails prosecution. Also, we must not forget instalment payments for fertilizers, milking machines, agricultural implements, etc., which come off the factory cheque before ever the farmer sees it, and which, for the most part, are bought at grossly exaggerated prices foi the value given. And where electric light and power and telephone are installed —well we all know that methods q£ collecting the charges due on these are particularly drastic. If all these expenses can be separated from “living" on a farm then perhaps Mr Levvey is right, only he might at least explain how they are all to be paid at the full rate or with trifling reductions on a gross income two-thirds or less of what it was, and it must never be forgotten that even at the pre-slump, level farming only just paid its way under conditions that any city labour union would describe as an outrage if applied to its members. One may be pardoned, perhaps, for harking back to the old slave conditions of a hundred years ago; The master had to feed his slave, clothe him, shelter him, give him straw to lie on; he by no means invariably treated him harshly. Above all the slave had no worries. It- has remained apparently for the twentieth century and a new country to devise a new form of slavery, whereby the farmer has to purchase all these things at disproportionate prices and by doing so support in comparative ease a numerous set of non-farming masters. —I am, etc., B.L.A. • March 26, 1932.