THE CHOPPING BLOCK.

Observer, Volume XXXVI, Issue 43, 1 July 1916, Page 3

THE CHOPPING BLOCK.

A Few Gaps.

SAID the farmer:—When I talk about farmers I don't mean the Farmers' Union exactly-, for that body does not accurately represent farmers as a body. I also don't mean dealers or speculators. I mean the "cockatoo" farmer, who grows crops or grows stock for market. I want to get you to say the farmer isn't making pots of money. The farmer is making less money than he made five years ago. I'll tell you why. The speculator has forced the price of land and the price of rental for land up. The dealer doesn't mind what price he pays if he can get a good, quick turnover and a profit. The price of land is based on the exorbitant rates induced by speculators and dealers. The farmer nowadays expects three working men to do the work one man used to do. There is no "farming class" of workers. The men are recruited from any kind of out-of-works. If they break your gear and play Old Harry with your farm, and you should object to pay 30s or 40s a week and "tucker," the incompetent will 6ay, "Oh, go to . I can get a job over the fence" — and he can! Boiled down, farming mostly means "milk." What about it? Well the dairy farmers made their contracts long ago. They don't get the "rise." When you accuse the farmers of lifting the millions you ought to know that it's the middlemen and not the farmers who lift it.

The farmer has no chance of "passing it on." Says you, "Look at the price of fat stock!" I retort, The cow that bore the calf that grew to be a fat bullock cost five or six pounds more than she used to. Herds are rotten with mammitis and tubercle and abortion. There's no profit in abortion, or tubercle, or mammitis. Buying a few head of beasts at a sale, buying a paddock, fattening them up and selling at a profit isn't farming—it's dealing. If the farmer smashes his reaper and binder (suppose he is fool enough to grow crops) and he wants "parts," he must get them through an agent, who has to have a "cut" before the parts come from Christchurch, or Sydney, or some other place. You buy a box of matches or a box of hairpins at an exorbitant price because there is a trust- operating in any line you like to mention, and it is "passed on." The cocky has no means of passing it on, if he wants to. The dealer and the speculator, who make the price of land soar up are at rock-bottom "taking it out of the hide" of the farmer, for, first and last, every penny comes out of the soil sometime or other.

Say® you, "My word, look at the price Jim got for his bullocks!" Sounds all right, but when.Jim tots up the rental of his grass land, the price he has paid for incompetent labour, the price he has paid for bonedust, the price he has paid to trusts for implements, Jim often finals that he would have been better off "milking on shares." Talking about that "milking on shares," for instance. Farmers must make heaps of money at that, surely? Well, here's me. I give Bill and Bill's family a third of the profits—that is, Bill gets a third of the milk cheque. It doesn't matter to Bill if

he rui»s the cows, or what the rent is, or the price of land" or seed, or manure, or anything of the kind. You can't "pass on." the money you've lost on Daisy having three blind teats, Dolly pegging out with tuberculosis, Roanie getting bogged, or Buttercup hanging herself in a wire fence. You might think a farmer's a fool. So he is! If he wasn't a fool he wouldn't be a farmer. Farmers make money all right, sometimes—by selling farms, but not by farming farms. By farming assiduously for several generations you produce peasants, feed the nations, and achieve poverty. Sounds a funny thing for a cocky to say, doesn't it? But I get a trifle tired of the never ending whine about us. You needn't be sorry for the farmers, though! They will tickle a spud out of the ground when things go awry, and will have a murphy to give to the town worker who hasn't got one. I am sorry for the town man—l mean the chap with eight bob a day and, say, four children and a wife to keep. He is the chap who is hardest hit by the detestable parasites who gamble in land, or stock, or anything else. How is he to carry on? He can't do it. The trusts of the tradesmen and the little stinking rings who collar the beef market and the bread market, and the fish market and every other kind of market, have him for a prey-. He is the chopping block for the lot of them, and the farmer distinctly does not chop on him. Don't tell me the farmer is the prizewinner in this great game of grab. He's part of the chopping block. And what can a poor writer of screeds say to that?