The Te Aroha News Published Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Mornings. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1924. A. AND P. STATISTICS.

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6546, 20 November 1924, Page 4

The Te Aroha News Published Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Mornings. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1924. A. AND P. STATISTICS.

THE last annual statistical report on agricultural and pastoral production shows that the area occupied by all farmers has decreased by 80,599 acres, or o*lß per cent., and that “so far as Comparison of two individual and consecutive years can indicate a tendency,” this decline into smaller holdings is going to continue. It shows that the number of horses in the Dominion on the 31st January, 1923, was 330,818, and that this year it was only 330,430; that there were 205 asses or mules last year, and that the number now is 148; and it shows also that the number of persons employed on farms, including “working proprietors or managers and such members of their families as are employed during the major part of their time on the work of the farm,” has declined in twelve months from 146,380 to 145,158. This last sad record does not of course include harvester or other casual workers, and if it did the result would be no better. For the harvest of 1923-24 was “the poorest for many years—probably the worst since the disastrous 1897-98 sea-

soil.” The yield of wheat dropped from 8,395,023 bushels in 1922-23 to 4,147,537 bushels in 1923-24, or from 30.44 bushels per acre to 24.01. Oats fell from 5,688,157 bushels to 1,964,511, or from 39.74 per acre to 30.77. It is, in fact, “safe to say that never in the history of the country has so small a proportion of oats been threshed. Statistics of wheat and oats are available for as far back as the season 1868-69 (fifty-five years ago), but the total yield of oats (grain) has never, in that period, been so low as was recordel in 1924.” Barley held its own, but “all grass seeds except rye-grass fell away in the aggregate, and none come up to the average for the season 1922-23.” Which means, as the Christchurch Press sees it, that “the farmer who is still smiling has no right to be smiling if his faith is in numbers, and his fortune in wheat or oats or horses or mules or the labour of many hands. Whether he knows it or not the jealousy that he excites in his compatriots has declined by nearly four-fifths of one per cent., and we are not sure that he is entitled, now that he does know it, to remain cheerful. From bees to Angora goats there are only decimal fractions of reasons for confidence, and if we did not know that his holding, though it has shrunk during the year by 4.61 ! still grows in the Liberal newspapers, we should have to regard his Carnival mood as proof of a decadent frivolity. For though it is true that he has more sheep than he had (694,•337 more)—that he rolled 3.22 per cent, more fleeces and tailed 2.18 per cent, more lambs —that he has nearly 150,000 more cattle and 13,000 more pigs, he has 80,599 acres less on which to feed and fatten them, and would long since,have abandoned hope but for the ‘aggregated’ confilence put into him by the anti-agrarians.”