OUR FARMING FUTURE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 24, 30 January 1933, Page 5

OUR FARMING FUTURE

NOT iN-WOOL-GROIrVII.G

INTENSIVE. CULTIVATION

(By Telegraph.) (Special to "The Evening Post.") AUCKLAND, 28th January. "The future of New Zealand does not lie in wool. You have got past that stage,.'' said - Professor J. Macdonald Holmes, the leader, of a party of students from the University of Sydney, who, after -having toured New Zealand to study economic geography, left again by the Monowai yesterday. Professor Holmes, who is professor of geography, was giving his impressions of the Dominion, both from the point of view of a tourist and, of a university man. ' He added that New Zealand had become too closely settled for" wool to be a principal product of the future. .''Your land has become too valuable to raise sheep for wool, or to range cattle, on," he said. "Farming in New 'Zealand, I consider, has become too intensive. Wool is f oi- a coun-try-of vast spaces, like Australia." He was impressed with the economic development ,of the dairying industry, and remarked: "Passing through, I saw many small 'dairy farms, well cultivated, and well advanced. That is partly, why I say that the future of New Zealand does not lie in wool. Dairying follows wool-raising. Your system of sowing grasses on hillock country has done much to develop dairying." The population seemed, comparatively speaking, to be widespread, the people living in a scries of towns, each self-contained, he said. That was different from Australia, where there were a few great cities, and for the rest, a few people scattered over the remainder of the continent. In the Dominion, in between the towns the land had been subdivided into small farms. "Because of that continued subdivision, I think that New Zealand must support a certain number of secondary industries," the visitor said. "All the rising generations cannot go on the land, because you cannot go .on subdividing. Those generations must do something, and I think that they will be, to some extent, anyway, absorbed in so-called secondary industries." ■ . From what ho could gather, he thought that the present depression would be slow in passing, but the recovery would be sure and certain. "There-will, I think, be-no quick return to prosperity, but tlie. return will be steady once it starts."