STARTING A FARM ON £5.

Taranaki Daily News, 29 October 1921, Page 12

STARTING A FARM ON £5.

SOUTH AFRICAN'S EXPERIENCE. The lowest capital with which you should start farming in South Africa is about £2OOO (writes a South African farmer in a London paper). But 18 years ago, fresh from school, I started on 100 acres with a handful of sheep and cattle, a £5 note, and £1995 worth of optimism.

And I wanted every penny’s worth of the latter, for I was in an isolated part of the backveld, 60 miles from the \iearest railway, with only two native servants, 1000 acres to work, and a waggon-tent for a house. I sold vegetables in the nearest village, 20 miles away, until the drought dried up the small spring, and I then got a Government drill to bore for water. Result: I got a supply of 50,000 gallons every 24 hours, at a depth of 100 feet. Then I sowed wheat —and th locusts took it.

I sowed maize then —and the locusts took that —swarms of locusts that passed over for days and hid the sun.

And I lived for months on mealie pap (maize meal) and milk. Sympathetic letters came from Eng-land-sweet joy to a lone veld dweller —urging me to “chuck it.” But I was keen —and full of-the beautiful optimism of youth. And then I got a record crop. Since then I have fought drought, hail, frosts, fires, floods, and pests—they are part and parcel of every farmer’s life in any part of the world, and they but go to make up the joy of life cr« the land, for nothing is worth having unless you have had to work very hard and struggle for it. To-day, on the same piece of land I have a large eleven-roomed honse, every brick of which was made on the faim. There are 80,000 bricks, and I could make them only three at a time! My big broad verandah, built of beau-, tiful white stone which I quarried out ot I a hill close by, is covered with creepers' ot honeysuckle, jasmine and roses. I have an orchard that gives me any- 1 tiring between 30001 b and 50001 b of fruit in the season—apricots, peaches, pears, I apple*, plums, strawberries—and keeps I me supplied with jam. I have planted 50,000 ornamental trees mostly pines and eucalyptus, some of I them over 50 feet high—in 18 years* And now plant 1000 trees, with a native helping me, in about three hours. I The”so,ooo gallons of water mn past n;v verandah through a rose garden that me basker* -UH of exquisite j

blooms every week. I have made a dam—-’it took me two year* —holding millions of gallons of water which runs in a clear stream through my trees and gardens and waters acres of permanent pasture grasses. There are stables built of solid stone, all quarried out of the same hill on the farm -shod*, kraals (stock enclosures), stores, and quarters -for 39 native servants. . - ' » Every penny that I made T put back into the earth in some form or other. .And to-day 1 am able to see around me rcsuM of effort, reward for labor—tangible.' permanent, lasting. But above this. 1 have had all through life one of greatest joys a man can have—the joy of creating.' ! And oil from a £o note