THE FARMEKS' CASE

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 129, 2 June 1936, Page 8

THE FARMEKS' CASE

TWO VIEWPOINTS

(To the Editor.) .> Sir,—As an«ex-dairy fanner of Taranaki, who during the slump of 1921-22, with hundreds of others, lost my farm, home, and every shilling of capital, the savings of years of hard work on the land by myself, wife, and four children, would you kindly grant me a little space to reply to the misleading statements made by Mr. W. A. Sheat, as reported in "The Post" last week. It is hard for me to realise that this is the same Mr. Sheat who, during the campaign which resulted in the election of the late Mr. Corrigan to represent Patea in Parliament, persistently advocated the Labour Party's policy as the only hope for the dairy farmers, and denounced the inflated land values and the unscientific system of marketing produce. If Mr. Sheat was justified then in his very spirited "calamity howling," he would be equally justified in doing so at the present time, because no national dairy farmer will agree with him that their lot is any better today than it was then. The factors which caused the slump. and consequent sufferings in 1922 are still with us today, namely, inflated land values and speculations in farm land and its products. I do not know why Mr. Sheat has changed his views, but I had hoped that he would have stuck to his opinions and assisted the first Labour Government .to bring into being a sane system of marketing dairy farm produce, and at the same time helping the producers to obtain a fair share of the reward of their labour. This is what the new marketing scheme of the Government will do, if it is given a fair chance; but when a man of Mr. Sheafs education and knowledge talks about the present Government's marketing scheme having the effect of "ousting the farmer" from the control of his own business and destroying the co-operative basis of the dairy industry, thereby inferring that it is going to be detrimental to the interest of the farmers, he is misleading the members of his organisation. I sincerely trust that the members of His organisation and all other dairy farmers will take no notice of Mr. Sheafs presidential address, but instead assist the Government in its attempt to secure for the genuine farmer, his wife, and children, a fair reward for their labour, and land at a reasonable price with security of tenure.—l am, etc., E. A. DAHL.

(To the Editor.) Sir,—You are to be congratulated on your impartial l comment.upon Mr. Polson's campaign of abuse, which is inconsistent with his attitude to the Dairy Board and incompatible with his position as head of a union which has repeatedly asserted its freedom from political bias. The Dairy Board had autocratic powers which acted detrimentally to the producers, as my own experience will verify. I was opposgd to the formation of the board, but Mr. Coates and company did not listen to me and hundreds of others. The year prior to the board's advent, I received an advance payment for butterfat of Is 5d per lb, with a final payment of Is 7id. In the board's first year, owing to its price-fixing policy, the advance dropped to B|d, and I made a loss of £400 for the season, -In common with the rest of the farming community. Why did not the president of the Farmers' Union protest about this? Our storage bill rose from a small sum to £20 per week, and coupled with the levy to date, the total would pay the wages of the staff for a period of five years.

The claim that the farmers are overtaxed does not tally with Sir A. Ransom's pre-election claim that the Government was assisting the farmers to the extent of £14,000,000 annually, to which must be added the extra amount required for overseas interest and imported goods which falls on the nonfarming community.

I will issue four challenges to the Farmers' Union, to publish: (1) What any group of one hundred farmers have paid in unemployment taxes; (2) what they have paid in any other form of taxation; (3) why farmers receiving from 21s to 27s 6d for lambs should receive a bounty by way of exchange, when the prosperity of this country was built up on prices that did not return £1 for the wool and lamb together; (4) why farmers who are receiving from £500 to £5000 a year bounty by way of exchange, and are running from one to three modern cars, cannot pay men with ten years' experience more than 25s.per week, with rough food and sleeping quarters. I think it is about time that some farmers had their ideas of justice renovated. —I arA etc., FARMER.