CULTIVABLE LAND

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIX, Issue 64, 2 March 1929, Page 12

CULTIVABLE LAND

RECLAIMED BY DENMARK TWO MILLION ACRES DEALT WITH. FJORDS AND MARSHES LAID DRY. Little Denmark is to the fore in a good many different fields, educational as well as practical and other directions. One of the most imposing, however, is the rational and energetic land reclamation which has been on for 60, years or more and is still being persevered with. One way ox another some 2,000,000 acres have been dealt with during the last five or six decades. The agricultural area, absolutely, has been increased 1,400,000 acres, of which 250,000 simply mean an increase of the country’s territory, inasmuch as this area formerly consisted of shallow fiords and lakes, the results having been obtained by damming, pumping and draining. The work, at which attempt* were made as early as 1725, has been carried out partly by private initiative, thousands of farmers having done excellent work on their c land, which, it should be remembered, is almost all freehold, and to a still greater extent by more or less official State-aided societies, more especially by the Danish Health Society, which owes its existence to Colonel Dalgas, and dates from 1866. During its 60 years of existence it has been instrumental in creating 2494 plantations, covering some 200,000 acres which were formerly barren moorland, und other vast areas have been turned into arable, cultivated land, the home of' countless small farmers. Other work in the direction of draining and otherwise improving poor arable land comprises hundreds of thousands of acres, and still larger areas of swampy and marshy land have been transformed into fertile meadows. Yet another field for the reclamation of land, in the literal sense of the word, is, as already mentioned, the laying dry of sounds and inlets and lakes, which have added some 250,000 acres to Denmark. An important work in this direction has just been completed in the island of Lolland, where the Rodby Fjord has been laid dry, un area of some 7500 It must be remembered that owing to the intense degree of cultivation of the soil in Denmark, there exists an actual land hunger in this country —the very reverse of what is the case in England, for instance.