Why Fanners Go Bankrupt

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 249, 20 October 1937, Page 16

Why Fanners Go Bankrupt

THE POSITION IN ENGLAND It is a fact that very few, if any, farms in this country aro making 5 per cent, profit (writes ‘‘A Farmer 0 in an English paper). Probably the majority are being farmed at a loss by men with long experience who work for 13 hours a day and have to be ready for emergencies during the rest of the 24. People who have no knowledge of farming seldom realiso the amount of capital necessary. They say that farmers are slow to take advantage of new machinery and new methods, but they do not realise the expense that is involved in such progress.

Let us take as an example the popular small farm of about 100 acres. To-day 1 it is mostly grass, with perhaps a few acres of roots and corn, which are grown without apparent loss because the time spent on them is time taken from jobs such as hedge cutting and ditch cleaning. Not many years ago that farm would have been self-supporting. The ploughshare would have been kept shining, the hedges cut, ditches cleaned. Thistles •would have been foreigners. The farmer might even have had time at night to walk across his land ior no other reason than to admire it.

To-day that same tenant, with about £1,500 to £2,000 invested in stock and implements, is worse off than a brick- j layer’a labourer. The position of larger farmers ia j worse. They keep going simply because they cannot do anything else until they go bankrupt—which they are doing with tragic frequency. You can stop a works and restart it at your convenience, but you cannot stop crops growing and restart them, j Compare this with the small businessowner who works eight hours a day. with Sunday and Saturday afternoon off, and does not know the trouble of getting out of bed in the middle of the night to attend a maternity case in the sliippon or pig-sty, or beginning work at 5.30 a.m.

A farmer is born to his life, and he asks for nothing better. He is prepared to work from dawn until dusk to get in his harvest—and thank Providence for the weather that makes it possible—but he must be entitled to make a living wage. He is producing the food but he is not getting tho benefit. The consumer is paying a price that would amply repay tho farmer, but it is not reaching him.

We used to talk about the middlemen; now we talk about the middlearmy. They have inspectors of various sorts who are perpetually driving their smart cars into the yard, and wasting the farmer’s time.

The ironical part of it comes when you realise that the better the quality of your product the more inspectors there are to hinder you. During May (tho last figures quoted by the Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture) the prices for milk paid to the farmer, who pays transit charges, varied from ninepence to tcnpence a gallon, with a penny bonus for “accredited” producers, while the consumer paid two shillings a gallon. Think of this: if a dairy-farmer sells a little milk round the village he is labelled a “producer-retailer, o and during May the Milk Board took about ninepence a gallon off him,' although he did all the work himself. Simple foods such as milk, butter, bacon, meat and vegetables, ought to be within the reach of every purse, j When they leave the farm their price is low enough. It is between the farm and ■ consumer that the profit is made. It is unprofitable now for dairy-. farmers to rear their own calves, so ; there is the wasted expense of taking them into market and buying them back later.

Subsidies are excellent on paper, but •ou cannot manage a farm’s internal