Wheat Price, 1941-42 Season

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23233, 21 January 1941, Page 6

Wheat Price, 1941-42 Season

Although farmers have shown some impatience, the announcement of the Government’s wheat price for the 1942 harvest has not been unduly delayed. Preparation for autumn sowing is this year easily anticipated by the Hon. D. G. Sullivan’s statement, as it has not always been. Wheatgrowers have sometimes had to put their crop in without knowing what the Government would pay for it. They are not in that uncertain position now. The 1941-42 price will be 5s 9d a bushel, with the usual increments and premiums, a price without variation from the 1940-41 season. Whether farmers will be inclined to accept this price as a fair one, encouraging them to respond to the appeal for a 300,000 acre sowing, is a question to which there can be no general answer. Somo will be well content; others will have to take some risk, greater or less according to circumstances. The one general factor is this: the number of growers who can reasonably expect to do well must be less, and the spread and extent of the risk of a loss must be greater, because production costs have undoubtedly advanced between season and season. The Minister, however, makes no reference to this alteration in conditions. It has been left to the president of the United Wheatgrowers’ Association to say that, in a recent conversation, the Minister promised to set up an inquiry into the posi-

tion of “ many growers on unmechanised “ farms ” and to see if their relative disadvantage could be rectified. In other words, if Mr H. F. Nicoll reports the Minister correctly, he is prepared to consider the subsidising of growers under recognised handicaps. Mr Sullivan should lose no time in confirming and amplifying this statement, which has an interest that reaches beyond the present emergency. For a great many years the tendency in New Zealand has been to conduct agricultural policy on the theory that large areas should be broken up and the cultivation of small holdings encouraged, enforced, and extended. It begins to appear that the small-holder, as such, is badly handicapped and that the State has to recognise the fact and modify a traditional policy.