A LESSON FOR QUEENSLAND

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2338, 7 January 1926, Page 10

A LESSON FOR QUEENSLAND

After a tour of the Victorian wheat areas, the special representative of th e Melbourne “Herald” reported;— Twenty million bushels of wheat have been grown by Victorian farm-

ers this year on a rainfall of about eight inches. It is a triumph of better farming. Never before has there been so great an area muter cultivation. But the yield to the acre will not average more than a bag and a-half. Every farmer in Victoria believed that this season was to be a. record. It has not been; and a considerable structure has fallen about their cars. The great confidence in the season that was so much talked of and demonstrated at the show, began tc fade the month after. It reflected abnormally back to the city. Farmers suddenly realised that the season was not going to fulfil its promises. Halt the crops began to perish. It seemed unreasonable to expect the others to succeed. Rain months passed without a cloud. They stampeded. They began violently trying to retrench.

That has passed. A tour of the country reveals that this year is the greatest demonstration in the history of the State.

It has shown that wheat can bo grown on a minimum fall of rain. It has shown that the great despised plain country is the best wheat area in Victoria. Out'there where a few years ago they said that wheat would not grow the best crops are being cut. '

It has been a lesson in farming—a bitter one for a number of careless farmers.

Almost every crop on stubble is being fed-off. Almost every crop on fallow is giving a return, some up to five and six bags to the acre. A farmer here to-day showed me a bare space in his crop. It had been a space between his fallowed land that he had been keeping for a road. He had changed his mind and ploughed it and put it under wheat with the rest. There was a five-bag crop on the fallowed land and nothing at all on the strip.