MORE PRODUCTION

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXII, Issue 254, 25 September 1942, Page 4

MORE PRODUCTION

AN ENORMOUS JOB

THE FARAIER’S PART.

(P.A.) CHRISTCHURCH, Sept. 24. AA’ith a decrease of 17.7 per cent, in manpower, the farmers of the Dominion will this year increase their cash crop production by 58 per cent. This increase in production was described as “wonderful” by the Alinis-t-cr of Primary Production for AVar Purposes (Air Poison) when he. met representatives of farmers in Christchurch.

The job, he admitted, was an enormous one. Farmers were asked to increase production without sufficient labour and without sufficient fertiliser, but were doing that. In the post-war years of 1936-39 the cash crops averaged 329,970 acres and this year (1942-43) they would reach 511,700 acres, an increase of 181,770 acres. Of that wonderful increase 10.000 acres would bo vegetables. He wondered if anyone realised what that meant. It meant 10,000 men at work in a diversification of the Dominion’s ordinary production, more than 30,000.000 cans of vegetables alone for the armies, and a total Dominion canning programme !of 150,000,000 cans. They ' had to co-ordinate the canner, grower, marketer, and consumer. They had to I organise growers so that cauners i could make contracts, got labour and material for the canner and see that the product suited the buyer. On the dairying side they had to put extra weight on pigs to overtake the reduction in number in order to supply the Allied forces. ■ The hope that next year everybody would have enough potatoes was expressed bv Air Poison to the Primary Production Councils of Canterbury. “It is better to have one short famine now than one this year and a worse one next year, lie said. The potato shortage had created considerable criticism The fact was that Australia America, and South Africa were just as short as New Zealand. Indeed, Australia was more so. AA 7 hen he had found that stocks were less than had been imagined he had been compelled to cut everybody s supplies short to get enough to grow next year’s crop.