22 MARCH 1935, Page 18

English Pioneers The art, or if you will, science by

which this success has been won is not American but, in most of its essentials, English. One of his first inspirers and practical advisers was an Essex semi-intensive farmer who shares the name and talent of the inventor of the stationary steam engine, who also has made intensive farming pay by aid of machinery and very unmechanical ideas. Ha and a little group of intensive cultivators who practise their art, some in Wor- cestershire, some in Norfolk, some in Wiltshire (cultivating a certain esoteric solidarity among themselves), have gone far to prove that recent discovery and invention have quite revolutionized the farm. Mr. Hosier, perhaps the most inventive of the group, has demonstrated the change in the extensive farming that alone is possible on such chalk uplands as belong to Wiltshire. The scene of the most successful intensive and, so to say, non-stop cultivation of fruit and vegetables is Worcestershire. The publication of Mr. Ford's accounts of the Dagenham experiments, now well past the experimental stage, will do much to focus attention on the new farming, on the transition in agriculture. He has made the desert flourish, if not like a rose, like a cabbage.