INCREASE IN WHEAT GROWING FORESEEN

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28249, 10 April 1957, Page 12

INCREASE IN WHEAT GROWING FORESEEN

“We have the land, we have the plant and the know-how, and labour is no problem/’ said Sir Walter Mulholland last evening, when he forecast that New Zealand was going to grow more wheat. He was one of a panel of speakers which discussed the decline in wheatgrowing in Canterbury in the last 50 years, and the possibility of a revival, at a meeting of the Christchurch branch of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand. More wheat would not be grown because of appeals to sentiment, Sir Walter Mulholland said. It would be grown if farmers were paid for it, and he thought they were going to be paid. Farmers would find it necessary to grow more wheat to balance their farming, he said. Wheatgrowing was one of the most attractive means of restoring a balance in farming. It was necessary too, he said, as a means of maintaining and controlling fertility of the soil. “We are getting to the point where fertility is running away with us,” he said. Strangely, Sir Walter Mulholland said, the “Grow More Wheat” campaign had achieved the opposite. During times of emergency farmers were prepared to respond to any call for assistance at some cost to themselves; but when the appeal was continued after the emergency had ended they looked on the appeal as an indication that wheatgrowing was unprofitable. The official view had been that it did not matter whether an acre of wheat was grown or something else was grown which could be exported in exchange for wheat, he said, but that argument was based on theory without examination of the facts. The exchange value of 40 acres of wheatgrowing land transferred into other products would not nearly pay for the wheat, he said. New Zealand as a -whole lost on the exchange, and lost substantially, although individual farmers might find it more profitable to have animal husbandry instead of wheat growing.

Others who took part in the panel discussion were Professor J. W. Calder, assistant director of Canterbury Agricultural College, and Mr J. D. Stewart, lecturer in farm management at the college. Professor Calder traced the trends in wheat acreage since 1880 and the yields of wheat. At present, he said, when the acreage sown in wheat was at its lowest, the average yield was about 40 bushels to the acre, compared with 27$ in 1880. Mr Stewart compared the returns farmers were getting for fat lamb production, against wheatgrowing returns, and said that farming being a way of life as well as an economic enterprise, the younger generation preferred sheep to wheat. He could not imagine a shift to wheatgrowing unless there was a relative change in prices. The only chance he saw of wheat making any gain was at the expense of barley and peas on high-yielding land and big farms.