CHANCES FOR BOYS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22464, 20 October 1947, Page 6

CHANCES FOR BOYS

OPENINGS IN AGRICULTURE FIELD OFFICERS NEEDED Avenues of opportunity in agriculture for young men from both town and country were described to senior pupils of the Gisborne High School and the Marist Hieh School on Friday afternoon by Mr. L. A. G. Barrett, liaison officer at Massey Agricultural College. After dealing with some psychological aspects of town and country life, he maintained that an unbringing on a farm, though desirable, was not an essential to a professional career in agriculture, the basis for which, however, should be a love of the soil and an understanding of the kindly people who tilled it.

“This country, so important to the world because of its ability to export such a large proportion of its agricultural produce, is in dire need of more young men to qualify as field advisers and research officers,” stated Mr. Barrett.

“It is a matter of concern that so few young men from the country districts are offering for this important work. Townsmen, however, are stepping into the breach, and in most cases are making a success of their ventureThey have been enabled to do this because of the great advances made in agricultural knowledge and practices over the last 30 years. A Kace of Engineers

"New Zealand is not now breeding a race of farm labourers, but of engineers and analytically-minded men with a fondness for rural life; men who will not rest until they have got to the root of things—for it is there, as in the case of atomic energy, that the secrets lie.

“Science has discovered many of those agricultural secrets, but there are vast.fields yet to be explored by trained minds.”

Dealing with the effects of environment on the outlooks of townspeople and country folk, the speaker said that farmers spent much of their waking life on springy turf in natural surroundings, which gave them a mental and spiritual rhythm often lacking in the brittle outlook of those city people condemned to live in surroundings where kindly Mother Earth was buried under inches of bitumen and concrete.

One of the most regrettable ways in which townspeople tended to escape from unsatisfying environment was in social competition and in “keeping up with the Joneses.” This competition, based entirely on an unsatisfying life, tended to make its unthinking followers jealously intolerent of those more kindly people who lived as Nature intended. Mr. Barrett was accompanied by Mr W. A. Jacques, a member of the College lecturing staff.