“A WONDERFUL INCREASE”

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23752, 25 September 1942, Page 4

“A WONDERFUL INCREASE”

♦ FARM PRODUCTION

MINISTER PRAISES EFFORTS

With a decrease of 17.7 per cent, in manpower, the farmer: of the Dominion will this year increase their cash crop production by C 8 per cent, The increase in production was described as “wonderful” by the Hon. W. J. Poison (Minister of Primary Production for War Purposes), when he met representatives of farmers in Christchurch last night. One of the problems, said Mr Poison, was that, though there was still land available in the South Island for more production, there had been a substantial fall in- Canterbury in almost all classes of arable farming, and he hoped that one result of this drive for intensive production would be to remedy that. The job, he admitted, was an enormous one. Farmers were asked to increase production without sufficient labour, and without sufficient fertiliser, but farmers were doing that. In the post-war years of 1936-39, cash crops averaged 329,970 acres, and this year (1942-43) they would reach 511,700 acres, an increase of 181,730 acres. Of that wonderful increase, 10,000 acres would be vegetables. He wondered if anyone realised what that meant. It meant 10,000 men at work in a diversification of the Dominion’s ordinary production, more than 30,000,000 cans of vegetables alone for the armies, and a total Dominion canning programme of 150,000,000 cans. ITiey had to co-ordinate the canner, the grower, the marketer, and the consumer. They had to organise growers so that canners could make contracts, get labour and material for the panner, and see that the product suited the buyer, ' On the dairying side, they had to put extra weight on pigs to overtake the reduction in the number in order to supply the Allied forces.