FARMERS AND THE WAR

Timaru Herald, Volume CVI, Issue 16311, 13 August 1917, Page 11

FARMERS AND THE WAR

WHAT PART OF THE COST * SHOULD THEY PAY? \ i A 'word in defence of the farmer | against the cry that he should be i made to pay a much greater share of j the war is contained in a letter pub- i lished by Mr W. _J. Poison, in the "Wangahui Chronicle": — "In the first place, it is surely un- ; necessary to point out that the farmer sends precisely the same proportion of his manhood to the war that otter classes of the community do; that in common -with the rest of the colony he is cheerfully suffering all the inconveniences of high prices of material, shortage of labour and so on; and that consequently his gross income is no guide to his net income. He pays from 100 to 400 per cent, more for his necessities, such as wire, wool pacts, power"; kerosene, grass seed, horse feed, etc., than he used to pay in peace time, and on the top of this, labour which was obtainable at trom 2os to 35s before the war, now costs ' him anything from two to three pounds per week. There are 77,229 .'arms in New Zealand, according to the official year book, and .while 15> 454 of these are very small holdings of ten acres or] less, whkh in the mar jority of cases ainploy no labour, the average number of employees occupied on the remaining 61,785 farms exceeds one man per farm; targe farms employ from five to fifty men and there are few farms of any extent which can be worked without labour. Indeed, it is the~ca.se that. the 6mall farms beinj? more intensively farmed, employ proportionately more men than the large holdings. Now, if we put down the increased cost of labour, and the increased cost of feedins: labour °t £1 per week per mam, we will not over-estimate the increased cose of working his farm to the farmer. Farmers will know that this is a low estimatee. so that the farmer pays iu extra wages alone in New Zealand at least £3,212.820 per annum. Now it is asserted that the farmer is a vampire fattening on the community because if we take the creased v\lue of exports and deduct the war tax (which I would point out does not include the income tax which the farmer now pays in, addition to his land tax) a, sum of two and a half millions is supposed to be divided amongst the producers. It is common knowledge amongst farmers that while their gross receipts may be greater in a few instances j their real returns are almost invari- ! ably less and rightly so. The above l is of course one of the reasons. Another reason is that a good deal of the two and a half-millions* referred to has not been made by the farmer at all but by the meat speculators who brought the farmer's _ produce forward amd reaped the profit, while i a l;o ,d deal more o; it is derived from ! allied industries, such as flax-milling with flax at £?0 a ton, in which the I farmer has no share."