TRANSPORT IN DENMARK

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21186, 5 November 1938, Page 15

TRANSPORT IN DENMARK

PROBABLY BEST I NWORLD ENGLISH VISITOR’S IMPRESSIONS Some might thing of the Danes as a national of small farmers who work on altogether too small a scale to use machinery to a great extent, writes L. F. Easterbrook. One sees comparatively few motor-cars on their roads, and at the great national show, which nearly 1,009.000 people attended in ten days, the car park boasted not many more vehicles daily than that at an English point-to-point. Danish farmers are of the peasantproprietor type, not the type one associates with mechanisation. But I found them served by what is probably the best road transport service in the world. No Danish farmer’s milk has to travel more than three or four miles to find the nearest creamery. After it is made into butter, the skim milk is returned, pasteurised qn the same day for feeding to the pigs and poultry, and plays a large part in the excellent quality and low production cost of Danish eggs and bacon. Their feeding stuffs and fertilisers are delivered by road transport at the door, and a highly organised system of road transport takes away their produce in fresh condition to supply England or Denmark’s few large towns. I did not see a farm horse and cart on the roads the whole time I was in the country.

It was explained to me that this highly organised transport system, done largely through the co-operative societies, is regarded as essential to Danish farming efficiency. The small farmers simply have not the time to do their own fetching and carrying and, as they work on narrow margins of profit (the Dnish dairy farmer only gets about 6d per gallon for his milk), they would soon be bankrupt if they attempted it. There are comparatively few tractors in Denmark, for the small farmer finds the horse more economic on the farm, but he has a wonderful range of other equipment. He can buy a small threshing machine for £26, and since he feeds to his livestock most of the corn he grows, he grinds his own feeding stuffs and presses out the straw for convenient handling. Straw-balers can be bought for £2B. A standard 15-acre holding has a plough and several kinds of harrows and cultivators, a roller, seed drill, grass-cutter and—seldom seen in England—a liquid manure tank and an implement that draws the manure out by pump and transports it to the fields. Great importance is attached to liquid manure as a fertiliser, and the newest implements have hollow coulters that scratch channels in the soil and drill the liquid manure into it like seed. In Denmark the State sees to it that the man who is considered fit to farm has a full range of mechanical equipment at his command.