PRODUCTION AND MORE PRODUCTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25473, 1 March 1944, Page 3

PRODUCTION AND MORE PRODUCTION

Sir,—jTust a few lines to my fellow farmer®. The war has now been going on for nearly five years. Two or three years ago those of us who are left behind realised, probably more so than the authorities, that our best contribution to the war effort was fo produce all we could in the way of food. We have grown weary. We can all find many answers to excuse us. We don't like this; we don’t like that; costs have risen, etc. The need for more production was never more vital than it is to-day. In the Old Country they are down to their last scrap. They are battered and torn in a manner of which we, fortunately,, know nothing in this Godblessed country. We are proud of what our boys have done overseas. We expected no less of them. Nothing will excuse us until we have done our last bit to check the fall in production. We know that women and children have worked, not 40 hours, but 80 hours and more, in the milking sheds and on the farms. We know that they started in the cold light of the morning whether it was raining or blowing or whatever it may be like. The work has had to go on.

Two or three years have told. We are short of men, and much of the labour we get is inefficient. Many of our horses are idle—there is no one to drive them. Many elderly men have done yeoman service on farms and stations. It is no excuse for us that we can point out others on a 40-hour week and on jobs where we know three men are doing what one ordinary man ought to do. It is still no excuse for us.

It would be a poor answer to our boys, shivering on the frozen hills of Italy, or sweating in the stinking jungle of the Islands, to tell them we cannot spare them that little piece of bacon to make a bit of relish for that' hard biscuit because we cannot raise that.extra pig. We have got to get back to it and raise that extra pig or do without ourselves, so that the fighting services may have that bit of relish with their hard tack; milk that extra cow so that poor 2oz of butter per week may not be reduced in old England. Or that Is 2d worth of meat—think of it, at English • prices, If it has to be reduced again! Again I say it does not excuse us. Never mind what has happened; never mind whether we dislike this or that—control, costs, Governments, unions, or whatever it may be. We have always had our growl at them and will have to the end. There is only one answer to the fall in production—go on till we drop and look our boys in the face when those who return,' war-weary men, ask how we got on here.—l am, etc., J. s. Jessep. Gisborne, February 24.