SPEED THE PLOUGH.
ONE of the important subjects with which the Prime Minister dealt vaguely in his speech on Monday was agriculture. When the Royal Commission on Agri- culture has reported, the Government ought at once to give the country a precise idea of what they mean to do, for, though it is difficult to carry on any kind of industrial enterprise when the trade policy of a Government is in- defimte, agriculture is by far the most difficult to conduct under these conditions. There is all the difference in the world between the heavy commitments and speculative risks accepted by a grower of corn and the comparatively light risks accepted by the dairy farmer who feeds ins stock on grass. The products of the dairy farmer are naturally protected against foreign competition, for milk cannot be imported from abroad ; and though butter is imported, it is not comparable with our fresh home-made butter. Naturally enough, therefore, the farmer who has his own interests to consider, like any other trader, tends, when the Government refuse to give him any promise of support, to choose the less speculative way of farming in preference to the more speculative. Unfortunately this choice is not to the advantage of the nation. It is desirable that Great Britain should become as near as can be a self- supporting country. It may be that the ideal of becoming entirely self-supporting is only a dream, but we are certain that the nation ought to make up its mind to come as near to that ideal as it possibly can. There are two reasons for this. The first is that we can never consider our defences secure until we produce enough from the land to feed the people during a rather prolonged emergency. The second is that it is desirable to observe a just balance between the population of the towns and that of the country. Grass fanning means a thin population on the land. The present writer knew a grass farmer some years ago who used to work a farm of a thousand acres with the help of one man and a boy. Now, although Mr. Lloyd George dealt with agriculture in his speech in a manner that some people have called perfunctory, we have good hopes. that there will be definite and excellent results because he has just appointed Lord Lee as President of the Board of Agriculture. This appoint- ment practically pledges the Prime Minister. Lord Lee is a passionate supporter of the Policy of the Plough, and we imagine that he would not have become President of the Board if he had not believed that the Prime Minister meant him to carry out that policy, and further that if he were thwarted in carrying it out he would not be amen- able to any stultifying accommodation but would resign. Mr. Lloyd George said that it was hoped to bring four or five million more acres under cultivation. Unless Lord Lee is allowed to prosecute his policy boldly, that cannot possibly be accomplished. Every one who watched the business of food production during the war knows what Lord Lee did then. In 1918 two million acres of corn- producing and potato-growing land were added to the existing arable. Some time ago Lord Lee and Sir Thomas Middleton drew up a possible farming policy for Great Britain, according to which the country might be made almost self-supporting in essential foodstuffs. In 1918 Lord Lee was the moving spirit in supplying tractors to farmers who otherwise would not have been able to plough their land, and there can be no doubt that he will continue on the same lines--organizing the farming of the country on the principle that a farmer is not working for himself alone but in the national interest. On this principle the farmer must expect to be treated as a more responsible person than ever before. Land is a monopoly in the sense that a man who farms badly is keeping off the land some one who would farm it better. The farmer must accept same rules and obey them, though we trust he will never have to be sent to prison like the Canadian farmers under Louis XIV. who forgot to cut their thistles ! Already land which used to be regarded as waste is being drained and reclaimed. Lord Lee, we imagine, will preach the doctrine that every acre of land under his control—namely, in Eng- land and Wales—should be regarded as subject to the plough unless it is deep old cultivated pasture or high sheep walk or water meadow. Land that is not ploughed, and that could be ploughed to produce commercial returns and help to feed the nation, should be regarded as wasted. Dutch, Danish, Belgian, and French cultivators who have visited this country have been amazed at the carelessness of many of our farmers. A Dutchman who, working by painful inches, has turned sand dunes into cultivated land envies the conditions of an English farmer, who can get fairly good land at a moderate rent, and who having got it by no means makes the most of it. " Make the dirt fly ! " ought to be Lord Lee's motto.
The appointment of Lord Lee is only one of those sur- prising vicissitudes which the British farmer has experi- enced, and, though it is a very good turn of fortune, we could wish that vicissitudes did not occur. Only two years ago when the Corn Production Act was passed it seemed that people had at last recognized the danger of the old policy of having no definite understanding between the Government and the farmers, and that with the lessons of the war in mind we should never relapse into the old methods. Yet a period followed, and became particularly acute after the signing of the Armistice, when farmers complained that the Government seemed to have for- gotten all about them, and to have lost all interest in their own policy. The tiller of the soil did not know where he stood or what he was to expect next. During the past few months there has not unnaturally been a distinct tendency amongst farmers to say that they must return to grass farming after all, and place all their hopes upon breeding stock on grass. We are certainly not indifferent to the breeding of stock. In developing pedigree stock England has led the way. But there is no reason in the world why we should not maintain this position, and even improve upon it, while we become an arable-farming rather than a grass-farming country.
It will be objected, however, that no matter how much Lord Lee may preach the Policy of the Plough, lie will never persuade farmers to embark upon a speculative business unless he can screw the Government up to the pitch of giving definite guarantees. Here we come to a very difficult matter. The Corn Production Act, well though it served its purpose during the war, is already out of date. The Act guarantees 55s. a quarter for wheat this year and 45s. a quarter for next year. The Act auto- matically comes to an end in 1922. The Government of course have extended the principle of the Act by guaran- teeing 75s. 6d. a quarter for wheat this year—an increase of 20s. 6d. upon the figure in the Act. But there the promises end. Nothing is more certain, however, than that the farmer will not be satisfied with this. He knows, because he remembers or has been told by his father, what happened forty years ago when a succession of bad harvests drove many of the English arable farmers into the Bankruptcy Court. During the forty years before the war 3f million acres, largely as the result of this experience, passed from arable to grass. This change meant a loss to rural life of something like a quarter. of a million men. The price per quarter of English wheat in 1913 was.31 s. an acre. In 1911 it was 31s. 11d. The farmer tells you that if prices ever came back to this level he could not possibly make farming pay so long as he was required to pay the present minimum wage. Of course the tendency of wages all over the world, of which our own minimum wage is only a particular example, would prevent prices from returning to that level. But the farmer wants a certainty, not a probability. The very conditions of farming—by a rotation of crops—require the farmer to make his plans a long way ahead, and he naturally will not make plans which are, as we should say, for the benefit of the nation, if they are likely, as he would say, to mean the ruin of himself. The Government therefore could not go wrong in saying to the farmer : " Go ahead in perfect security. We do not promise to give you wealth out of the people's purse, but since you are working in the interests of all, and your industry must be secured for the safety of the nation, we do promise that you shall be secured against ruin." This in the circumstances would be a safe promise for the Government to make. It is no longer true that the British farmer can be swamped by immense importations of grain from virgin lands across the seas where, as the saying is, they tickle the land with a hoe and it smiles back with a harvest. The rise in the standard of comfort is universal. But even if during the next few years the amount of tonnage is so greatly increased and the freight rates so greatly reduced that the British farmer cannot compete against the foreign price, he should still be secure. This is a matter, no doubt, on which the Royal Commission will make recommendations. For our part, whenever a money guarantee may be found to be necessary, we should prefer that it took the form of a subsidy. There would be two advantages : the first is that foreign corn-growers would not be prevented by a tariff barrier from sending us grain, and the second is that the taxpayer would know exactly where he was. He would not have to get his information by wading knee-deep through the almost untraceable results of indirect taxation. Lord Lee, we believe, has expressed his belief that if im- proved methods both in farming and in marketing foodstuffs were introduced, and more and better machinery were used, the cost of home-grown food within a very few years would be so greatly reduced that it could fairly compete against foreign rivalry. Probably he is right. In that case the guarantees given by the Government would really be nothing more than a form of insurance. Except in rare instances, the Government would not be called upon to pay.
Sir Thomas Middleton's comparison between the pro- ducts of British and German farming before the war has often been quoted, but we may quote it once more. The point of it is that the German farmer became a character- istically arable farmer under what was called the Plough Policy of the German Government :— " On each hundred acres of cultivated land-
1. The British fanner feeds from 45 to 50 persons, the German farmer feeds from 70 to 75 persons.
2. The British farmer grows 15 tons of corn, the German farmer grows 33 tons.
3. The British farmer grows 11 tons of potatoes, the German farmer grows 55 tons.
4. The British farmer produces 4 tons of meat, the German farmer produces 41 tons.
5. The British farmer produces 17} tons of milk, the German farmer produces 28 tone 6. The British farmer produces a negligible quantity of sugar, the German farmer produces n tons."
It has often been objected that this comparison takes no account of the larger number of hands that are required to produce the German result. The objection leaves us quite unmoved, for though it is true that from a balance-sheet point of view the wages of the greater number of German hands ought to be included, the fact that more hands are required for arable farming than for grass farming is the very result that we desire. The more people we have living the healthy life of the countryside, the better.
In this prospect of England becoming a place where we shall see, in Pope's words, " laughing Ceres reassume the land," we must not leave out the holders of allotments. A good many holders of allotments find that their tenancy is coming to an end, and there is a disposition to regard their labour as a kind of war service which need not be repeated. This is a great mistake. The work of allotment-holders should not only be continued but expanded. The allot- ment-holder will do well to carry on for his own sake, if not for that of the whole country. During the period of scarcity in which we are bound to continue for some time, the products of allotments and small gardens may make all the difference in countless families between comfort and want. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the owner of a garden need never know what hunger means, even during the worst of times such as in the crisis of a war. To whatever height wages and freights and the profits of middlemen and retailers may rise, the man who tills his own little bit of soil need trouble little about them. The cost of a first-rate cabbage in the shops may be 10d., but for him it may remain ld. Potatoes may disappear from Covent Garden because the Government try to interfere with economic laws, but the man who has just lifted two or three hundredweight of potatoes from his back garden or his allotment and placed them in a dry shed can afford to smile.
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