THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, JULY 13, 1929. FOSTERING AGRICULTURE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20306, 13 July 1929, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, JULY 13, 1929. FOSTERING AGRICULTURE.

How desirable it is that a larger number of the youth of the Dominion should take up agricultural pursuits, and how little is being effectively done to induce them to do this, are facts which have had emphasis this week at the conference of horticulturists. Lest there should be anything approaching satisfaction with the present position, it is well to have the facts reiterated. Leaving out " personal and domestic service" —the designation, in the Dominion's industrial statistics, of what is sometimes colloquially called hired help in the home—four groups of employees, absorb the bulk of the wage-earners of this country. They include agricultural and pastoral employees, treated statistically as one group, while the other three groups are made up of operatives engaged in manufactures relating to dress, clerks and others attached to commerce, and school teachers. When attention is fastened on the comparison between the numbers engaged in agriculture, broadly defined, and the numbers in commercial offices, there is obtained an arresting piece of information. Using as a basis the number of workers per 10,000 of those employed in all groups, the figures for the last industrial census show a total of 3991 engaged in agriculture and 2593 engaged in commercial offices. These figures indicate a disproportionate, number employed in commercial offices. When there arc added the numbers for industries relating to dress arid for education, a total of 5116 appears for the three main groups apart from agriculture, against the 3991 in this group. This somewhat rough comparison, while it takes no account of the relative ease with which girls may enter commercial offices and the natural obstacles in the way of their entry to many avenues of agricultural employment, does not give fully the significant facts, for the commercial figures do not include employees in the Civil Service and in businesses dealing with property and finance. A careful analysis of all the figures might lead a stranger to this country to think that its activities are mainly industrial and commercial. In making this deduction, he might err a little through forgctfulness of the relatively small demand for labour made by the more raising of livestock, but otherwise fie would not be far astray. He would probably be amazed to learn subsequently that its agricultural possibilities are immensely greater than the figures suggest, and be moved to wonder that these possibilities are not being realised by more intensive cultivation and greater attention generally to a

potential source of vast national wealth. Other statistical facts would conl)rm his amazement, such as the. facts that only about 2(5 per cent, of the male breadwinners in the Dominion are engaged, in its various agricultural and pastoral industries, and that leps than one-half of these are wage-earners. To learn that the rest were in agricultural pursuits on their own account would convince him that there is splendid scope in these pursuits for those ambitious of independence, but even this would but serve to impress him with the truth that., for so young a country and one blessed with an abundance of fertile land, nuich of it arable, and a favouring climate, a great deal remains to be done before the point of maximum agricultural productiveness is reached. It is well to take the point of view of an aloof observer of these things, for it checks an unwise tendency to enlarge on excuses for this palpably unsatisfactory state of affairs. As excuses, some things may reasonably be urged in explanation of the facts, but they do ilot, dispose of the facts, nor of (he necessity t,o remove the reasons for them. One of the reasons had clear expression at the conference of horticulturists —too little has been done to give an agricultural bias to the education of the youth of the Dominion. To harp on this string

may produce in some minds a distaste for a monotonous melody, but the view voiced in the conference has too much truth for it to be lightly dismissed. It is beyond doubt that all the material factors of agricultural prosperity on an immensely greater scale exist in this country. The human factor alone is insufficiently applied. In the latest edition of the Education Department's booklet on vocational guidance, the bare facts are expressed, as in these sentences: '' In every sense, the farmer is the backbone of a country ; this is particularly true of this Dominion, in which for many years the agricultural and pastoral industries must be the main support of the country." Such statements are easily made: it is the implementing of them in policy, and particularly in educational policy, that is vitally essential. It is to be hoped that the representations made by the conference to the Minister of Education will hasten tlie imparting of the educational bias desired by its findings.