NOTES BY THE WAY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 5 January 1929, Page 14

NOTES BY THE WAY.

The weather never quite suits everyone, but, so. far as one pan see, the only farmers with the slightest room for a grumble will be those who had hay out iu the recent rains. Some farmers consider they have had perhaps too much warm rain and that the grass has run away. Had they dared to take the risk they would have ! mown it so as to keep it down and get the young growth, but they generally considered it was unwise to take the risk in case of a dry spell such as was experienced last year. The flush of rough feed would in such a case be very useful. But it would seem that there does not appear to be much risk now. Generally the rain has been a godsend to the young crops which, where sown fairly early, were in urgent need of the rain. The growth of grass has made tne stock market harder and firmer than ever. Stock experts say they have • never known suck ai season, and men [ who are grazing will not let their stock go and are actually trying all the time I to get more. I Lucerne-growing is still more or less in .the trial stage in mid-Canterbury, and any market increase in the area devoted to its growth within the past five or six years has been confined chiefly to the better lands where mixed farming is the practice. Soi far as can be gathered, this increase does not exceed a matter of from 300 to 400 acres altogether. Demonstration plots at the Ashburton Experimental Harm 1 have furnished useful information which has been available to and much appreciated by intending growers. The year just dosed has been one of the best from a farmer’s viewpoint for a decade. Prices for no particular pro:duct reached an extremely high point, as did wool in 1924, or butter at the close of the war, but they have remained with wonderful consistence at a profitable level, and primary producers as a whole axe starting out on the new year in a much sounder position than has been the experience for a number of years past. Discussing the marvellous recovery of Prance after the wax, a traveller who knows the country well says: ‘ ‘ One of the moist powerful factors in. this process is the age-old devotion of the peasants to the land they own and cultivate. Immense treasure lies in the l potentialities of the soil, and the peasant knows it. He lives the narrow life of a devotee whose devotion is half instinct and half a religion of the earth. The highly imaginative Greeks of antiquity personified such a nature worship in the maternal beauty of Ceres, and the more material-minded Romans in the Earth Mother of many breasts. The Gallic peasant worships at the same shrine a deity under another name. He and his family seem to be in a kind of voluntary slavery, aind mare ‘ adscript], solo’ than the serfs of feudalism. Their toil knows no limitation of hours nor of output. So long as there exists an industrious peasantry who own the soil, and so long as the fertility of the earth remains, Prance will hold within her own loins the latent power of recovery. She will be able to find work for her people and to feed them.”