SPECULATION v. CULTIVATION.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 341, 1 March 1911, Page 6

SPECULATION v. CULTIVATION.

; -o j A KURAL BLIGHT. We are familiar with the assertion . that British farming methods are hopelessly behind those employed in this country. These notions (observes the Taranaki ''Daily News") are usually brought to New Zealand by people who go Home on holiday, and return fully convinced that the Dominion has nothing to learn. If New Zealand has nothing to learn, the criticisms of the eminent agriculturists who comprise the Scottish Commission now visiting this country are unnecessary and useless. The Commissioners have been in the south, where, if rumour speaks truly, intensive farming is carried on to a greater extent; than it is in this island. The Commissioners inferred that the methods of the best southern farmers { are not so thorough or so scientific as | the methods of the best Scottish or | English farmers. If this is true — | and there is no reason to doubt it — j there must be a reason. The colonial | farmer is not less intelligent or at ! heartless industrious than his Scottish | or English relative, much of his land is as good or better than that farmed at Home, and certainly there cannot lie so great an exhaustion of soil in this new country. The British farmers is a farmer and not a speculator. He generally lives and dies on the same farm and hands over the lease or the fee simple—if he owns it —to his children. He does not buy a farm or lease a farm in order to merely hang on to it until some stray valuer, at the instigation of boomsters, assesses it out of all proportion to its worth. If the farming in New Zeaj land is poor it is simply because land i is regarded more as an exchangeable | commodity than as a medium for the | growth of produce or stock. Of | necessity, should the population in- | crease this speculative tendency must decrease, and with land at a price consonant with what may be taken from it, owners and lessees will mend their methods in order to make the largest margin of profit. As long as it pays better to juggle with land than to stick to it and force every possible blade out of it, so long must farming methods be in many cases haphazard. The presence of farmers who go in for intensive scientific farming would make no difference, for newcomers are soon afflicted with the blight. The Minister of Lands lately repeated the formula that everything possible must be done to attract increase in settlement. Therein lies the remedy. As soon as the settler tries to beat his fellow man in production and not at a bargain, so soon will the finest results be obtained from a country pre-eminent for its productiveness.