SETTLING MEN ON LAND

Southland Times, Issue 23374, 4 December 1937, Page 19

SETTLING MEN ON LAND

English Scheme For Unemployed GOVERNMENT SUPPORT OFFERED The “Land Settlement Scheme,” initiated in England and run by the Land Settlement Association (Ltd.), has the sympathy of, and part financial support from, the Government. This “back to the land” movement is now progressing rapidly, and is attracting a good deal of public attention, especially in the districts affected. A similar movement has recently been begun in Scotland, where Castle Semple, Renfrewshire with 1100 acres of land has been purchased for £ll,OOO by the Scottish Department of Agriculture. The scheme is unique, for the men whom it is intended to assist are drawn from sources strictly limited —the ranks of the unemployed in the worst-off of our great industrial centres. It is a commendable attempt to inure once again to work men who from disuse of hand and brain have lost the working habit, and have grown into acceptance of the “dole” as their regular means of subsistence. It is, in fact, an effort to save the souls of men deteriorating mentally and physically through no fault ,of their own. For that reason alone" most thinking people will wish it success. CAREFUL SELECTION AND TRAINING Tire men—all of them married—are carefully selected, the threefold qualification for acceptance being residence in a Special Area, a willingness to wotk on a co-operative basis (for purchases and sales), and physical fitness. Over them are placed officials even more carefully selected —men with the highest possible technical qualifications, and —an important factor —with a knowledge of handling them. The suitability of each candidate for a holding is tested from time to time during the fifteen months he spends in intensive training—in chicken rearing, pig breeding, ploughing, harrowing, packing, etc. Not till the end of that time is a man deemed competent to take charge of a holding under the close and careful supervision of an expert warden attached to each colony of settlements. Though the work is hard and quite new to the men, it is a remarkable fact that last year only 24 men—a mere 3 per cent.—retired after six months training, one main cause of these regrettable lapses being the health of the men or their wives. This is important, for the cost of training is expensive, each holding entailing a capital expenditure of £lOOO, £7OO of which has to be spent on buildings, and £3OO on the settler himself, against which, of course, must be balanced the amount that would have been expended upon him through the “dole.” RESTORING A MAN’S INDEPENDENCE The eventual aim is to make each man primarily responsible for the profits and losses on his greenhouse, piggery, outdoor crops, etc., and thereby to restore to him an independence to which he has for a long time been a stranger. “Broadly,” as one editorial note put it, “the scheme aims at turning the ‘dole’ which would be utilized in maintaining the men in idleness into a fund for training them to produce from the land commodities which the ordinary farmer does not produce, the demand for which is largely satisfied from abroad.” The second annual report of the Land Settlement Association (Ltd.) shows that at the time of writing 24 estates had been acquired covering 10,806 acres of land, on which ultimately about 2000 small holdings will be established. When that report was issued, something like 2000 persons, men, women and children, had already been transferred to the estates, and during 1937 the association hopes to produce some 28,000 pigs and 250,000 chickens. The eventual number of birds in hand will be about three-quar-ters of a million.