WAR PRODUCTION

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 75, 25 September 1942, Page 4

WAR PRODUCTION

MEN ON THE LAND

POTATOES AND VEGETABLES

(P.A.) CHRISTCHURCH, This Day. The hope that next year everybody would have enough potatoes was expressed by the Minister of Primary Production for War Purposes (Mr. Poison) tonight, when he met primary production councils.

It was better to have "one short famine now than one this year and a worse one next year, he.said. The potato shortage had created considerable criticism, but the fact was that Australia, America, and South Africa were just as short as New Zealand. Indeed, Australia was more so.

When he found that stocks were less than had been imagined he was compelled to cut everybody's supplies short to get enough seed to grow next year's crop. With a decrease of 17.7 per cent, in man-power, the farmers of the Dominion would this year increase their cash crop production by 58 per cent. The increase in production was wondei'ful. The job was an enormous one. Farmers were asked to increase production without sufficient labour, and without sufficient fertiliser, and were doing it. In the years 1936 to 1939 cash crops averaged 329,970 acres, and this year (1942-43) they would reach 511,700 acres, an increase of 181,770 acres.

Of this wonderful increase 10,000 acres would be vegetables. It meant 10,000 men at work, more than 30,000,000 cans of vegetables alone for the armies, and a total Dominion canning programme of 150,000,000 cans. They had to co-ordinate the canner, grower, marketer, and consumer. They had to organise growers so that the canners could make contracts, get labour and material for the canner, and see that the product suited the buyer.

On the dairying side they had to put extra weight on pigs to overtake production in number in order to supply the Allied forces.