MORE POTATO CROPS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 86, Issue 226, 25 September 1942, Page 5

MORE POTATO CROPS

FARMERS COMPLIMENTED KEASON FOB SHORT “FAMINE” (P.A.) Christchurch, Sept. 25. The hope that next year everybody would have enough potatoes was ext pressed by the Hon. W. J. Polson, ! Minister of Primary Production for War Purposes, to-night, when he met primary production councils. “It is better to have one short famine now than one this year and a worse one next year,” he said. The potato shortage had created considerable criticism, hut Australia, America and South Africa were just as short as New Zealand. Indeed, Australia was more so. When he found that stocks were less than had been imagined he was compelled to cut everybody's supplies short to get enough seed to grow next, year’s crop. With a decrease of 17.7 per cent, in manpower, the farmers of the Dominion will this year increase their cash crop production by 58 per cent. The increase in production was described as “wonderful” by Mr. Polson. He admitted that the job was an enormous one. Farmers were asked to increase production without sufficient labour, and without sufficient fertiliser, but they were doing that. In the pre-war years of 1936-39 cash crops averaged 329,970 acres, and this year (1942-4.3) they would reach 511,700 acres, an increase of 181,770 acres. Of that wonderful increase. 10,000 acres would be vegetables. Mr. Polson added that he wondered if anyone realised what that meant. It meant 10,000 men at work in a diversification of the Dominion’s ordinary production. More than 30,000,000 cans of vegetables alone were required for the armies, and the total Dominion canning programme was 15,000.000 cans. They had to coordinate canner grower, and consumer. They had to organise the growers so that the canners could make contracts, get labour and material for the canner. and see that the product suited the buver. On the dairying side they had to put extra weight on nigs to overtake a reduction in number, in order to supply the Allied Forces.