POSSIBILITIES IN WHEAT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18946, 18 February 1925, Page 8

POSSIBILITIES IN WHEAT.

The foremost British authority on wheat-growing has been urging that more grain should be grown in the United Kingdom in the interests of national safety. Professor Biff en emphasises, as he has done before, that in production per acre, Britain outdistances all the countries upon which she relies to make up her deficiency in grain. Yet farming languishes, and in particular graingrowing continues on the downgrade. Addressing a gathering of farmers last year, Professor Biff en said no wheat-exporting country could grow the crops that Britain's wheat lands and climatic conditions were capable of producing. The production should pay its way when the crops were more suitable for their primary purpose, breadmaking. In the last sentence lies the answer, in part, to the riddle. British wheat hitherto has not been favourably regarded for breadmaking, unless mixed with a certain proportion of imported grain, generally Canadian. This has tended to depress the price. A new variety, however, " Yeoman Two," has been acclaimed as escaping this disability. Experts declare that bread made from it alone will pass the severest tests for quality. Professor Biffcn now promises the development of a variety even better than Yeoman Two. There is a lesson here for New Zealand. The average production in this country is 30 bushels to the acre, as against 13 bushels in Canada, the greatest granary of the Empire, and virtually the greatest in the world. Yet in New Zealand wheat-growing diminishes, and of recent years all kinds of artificial stimuli have been demanded and applied, with no good results. The director of Lincoln College told the Master Bakers' Conference last year that wheat-growing in this country suffered from antiquated methods and unsuitable varieties used as seed. In the pastoral industries, New Zealand farmers have not been content to follow their teachers. They have gone ahead and developed types of sheep and cattle and methods of husbandry best suited for the natural conditions and the requirements of export trade. Their example has not encouraged similar enterprise in the cultivation of cereals, for in that department of agriculture it would be difficult to discover any substantial progress. Throughout the wheatgrowing districts of the South Island farming is generally more intensive and more nearly on model lines than in the North Island, but it is also very much more conservative: There the farmers know that the yield from their wheat fields is much higher than in Australia, but it is doubtful whether many know that it ranks among the highest in the world. Even if that fact were realised, they have still to discover that if there ia justification for the long-standing complaint that wheat-growing does not pay, the explanation is to be found in their methods and in the kinds of wheat sown rather than in the soil or .in the. dimate. ~

AFTERMATH 01? THE BOOM

Typical and tragic cases are quoted by the Minister for Lands in a statement he has made relative to the revaluation of soldiers' farms. It was expected that the worst problem would centre round the man who had bought a single farm from a private vendor, received an advance for part oL the purchase money, and given a second mortgage for the balance. The Minister endorses this estimate fully. He makes reference also to that time of folly when, to judge by general feeling, everyone who went into a farm was taking a short cut to wealth, irrespective of the price he was paying for the land, or of his own experience in a calling which cannot by any means be acquired by the light of nature. Mr. McLeod touches on the extreme pressure then put upon the Government to intensify its efforts to find farms for all who wanted them. That excuse has been offered before. The answer to it is that Governments ■ are not always blameless if they yield to popular clamour. The right course is sometimes the distasteful one of resisting. ]t was not followed in the boom years of 1919 and 1920, even though tiie Government was warned of the blunders it was perpetrating. Now, as the Minister remarks, it has to bear the blame for what was done. That is natural. The party in power is always blamed for everything. In. this instance it was not, the Government alone which was culpable. No party represented in the House in those years is free of reproach. From the Opposition side there was never shown any real appreciation of the folly being committed. Men who now indict the Government could then have been heard urging greater and still greater effort in placing soldiers on the land, without offering effective criticism of the methods pursued. They cannot escape their share of responsibility for the things revealed in the Minister's statement.