FARM MECHANICS

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 November 1931, Page 9

FARM MECHANICS

LORD LYMINGTON’S scheme. BASINGSTOKE, September 5. Next Tuesday Viscount Lymington, M-P, who farms 2,500 Hampshire acres at Ellisfield near here, is disposing of his last fifteen horses forced off the land by the tractor. The horses are being sold, and today Lord Lymington described to me the causes of this significant step, his ideas of mechanisation and his policy as a. practical farmer. His example constitutes one of the most interesting experiments in the recent history of British agriculture. < Lord Lymington, who is only 33, is the elder son and heii of the Lail of Portsmouth, a considerable Hamplandowner, and he sits in Parliament for Basingstoke, an agricultural constituency. He was born on a farm, and was trained as a farmer- During the war he saw service in the 2nd Life Guards. “The first eleven years of my life, he said (when interviewed by a "Sunday Times” representative) I spent on my father’s ranch in Wyoming. After the War I went to Oxford for a period of scientific training, and for several years I have been a director of the Portsmouth family estates, which have been formed into a limited company.

“Staiting with a few hundred acres, land has constantly been added as it became available, and now the total acreage cultivated is 2.,500. From the beginning I have tried to discover the most economical and profitable methods. I have bought my experience, but now, it seems that it may have been worth the price. “The mechanisation of the farms is rpally a development in a larger scheme. As I proceeded, it became clear to me that the British climate was our worst enemy so far as the old-fashioned methods of cultivation were concerned- It also became clear that it should be our greatest friend. “No other country in the world has a climate so consistently mild, and a rainfall so spread out that it ensures grass and fodder crops- This, then, was the problem: How to develop our worst enemy into our best friend. PORTABLE DAIRIES & COWSHEDS. “I began using portable open-air dairies and putting land down to grass. Thus, instead of having, as at first, 400 acres of grass and 2,100 acres arable, I gradually reached the point when I had 1,600 acres grass and 900 arable. I kept these 900 acres arable not because it paid to do so, but because they formed an insurance against drought if and when pasture gave out. “I also found, so far as that particular part of Hampshire was concerned, that the idea that you cannot grew good grass there did not apply, and that with careful but not inexpensive management and with heavy "treading” you could get a healthy and abundant herbage.

“But this still left me with the heavy capital costs and labour expenses of fixed cowseds. With the movable cowsheds, which cost £7 JO, two men can look after seventy cows; fixed cowsheds for the same number of cattle would cost from £2,000 to £3,000, and would require a good deal more labour. The saving has thus been considerable.

"Even that, however, left me with the problem of arable land untouched. More than that, I was still at the mercy of the weather in drought, or a very bad hay year. I had reached the point when the cost of working the arable land was eating up the profits ,cn the dairies, pigs, sheep, and livestock generally. I had to go further-

“It was then that I realised that

the horse is the most expensive, though the most attractive instrument of cultivation on the farm. It eats when it is not working, and is just as liable to deteriorate in action as the machine. Furthermore, it requires attention when it is not working. “The ordinary tractor which has a two-wheel drive is simply an expensive insurance in England, so that when the fine weather comes one will be able to take advantage of it by doing work more quickly than by horse labour. It is indeed, practically speaking, as expensive as the horse and less useful at certain times of tho year, simply because it “packs” the ground and causes more damage than it does good-

“The tact revealed to me was that if could find a tractor which would distribute its drive and lessen the weight of its ‘tread’ I would then have something to replace the horse, and suffer none of the disadvantages of the ordinary tractor. “This I found the modern chaintrack tractor can do. It is intensely mobile; its greatest pressure on the ground averages only four pounds To the square inch, and for about one and a-half times the fuel expenditure (it runs on petrol) it will do the work of three ordinary tractors.

“I have now two chain-track tractors doing the work of eighteen horses and their attendant labour, and they can be used on the land for more working days than the horses-. In other words, with them I can beat the weather.

“Instead of taking a week to gather in a thirty-acre/ field, it can be done new in a day—witli tlie necessary cultivation before and after seeding- The chain-track tractor can be worked in two shifts; sixteen hours a day—by daylight in. summer and with headlights in winter—when there is real necessity for heavy work to be got through quickly. THE FARM FACTORY. “All these methods were leading me to my ideal. I had found that if you sell cereals from your land you .are selling a semi-raw material. If, on the other hand, you turn them into pigs, etc., by grinding them with a mixture of other, things, or into milk, going through two or three processes on the farm, you are then really running a factory.

“The completing of live stock is far more profitable than the selling of raw material, and despite the wholesale displacement of labour by mechanisation, the very fact that instead of selling your raw materials as ordinary cereals straight to the grain merchant you are working on and with them, you have as many men employed as you had under the old system, and on the average far better paid. “I have not yet finished the process nor reached my ideal. We have not yet got a harvest-thresher, wj/ich will place us beyond the vagaries of the weather. Another thing we want is a machine which will cut young grass, lucerne—a most important crop, still

in its infancy in this country—-and young cereals six and eight inches high, and dry them so that they can be turned into food which when dry is equal to cake costing £6 to £S per ton. “That would make farmers absolutely independent of the weather, and would enable them to double their stock-carrying capacity. “Norn? the less, I am perfectly certain, speaking from my own experience, that if we turn our attention as a nation to these methods of livestock raising alongside the cultivation of arable land, we can, even in the wheat-raising eastern counties, compete with any country in the world in producing beef, mutton, pigs, milk, and dairy produce“The utmost we can save in imports by tinning our attention to wheatgrowing would be £20,000,000 a year. By the methods I am applying we cculd save, roughly, £200,000,000 a year, and we could employ another 500,000 men. I think it is worth consideration.” AGRICULTURAL CREDITS. Lord Lymington, when asked whether ail this did not involve some amount of capital expenditure, and whether the Agricultural Credits Act would help, admitted at once that here was a stumbling block“I have been able to apply my ideas,” he said, “because the credit of the Portsmouth Estates was behind me. Unfortunately, many farmers have no funds and no credit- They might go to the State, but dare not, since they are mostly pledged to the dealers, and as a loan from the State becomes a prior claimt, when one is given, the dealers, in alarm, promptly foreclose. , “A great many in such cases have occurred, and they have seriously impaired the efficiency of the Act, and stultified the purpose for which it was passed. It is quite evident that Britain will have to do something more about this question of land credits. In Germany, two or three weeks ago, I found that loans are being granted to cultivators at as low as 3 per cent., although the general rate for advances there is 10 per cent, to 12 per cent.”