Courageous Husbandmen England is very busy with agricultural experiments of
all sorts. One new adventure is being made on a very large scale on the Wiltshire Downs, near the scene of Mr. Hosier's triumphs, but is of a diametrically different nature. A farmer from overseas holds that sheep can be made to pay in England by the same wholesale methods that prevail in our Antipodes ; and some 3,000 to 4,000 acres of downland are to be cleared of all other farming operations' to make room for the sheep. One point in the experimenter's argument is worth close attention from those not well acquainted with land values in different parts. The English land is preferred to land overseas because it is much cheaper. What a strange cat-i'-pan is here ! While land in Canada, New Zealand and to a much less extent in Australia was boomed to an absurd altitude, front which even now it has not sufficiently descended, the value of land in England sank to the vanishing-point.
. To quote examples within my own personal experience,
could buy Wiltshire downland for £4 or 15 an acre or less, while sheep farmers in New Zealand were paying £30; and on the Darling downs—on the way &Om New South Wales to Queensland—you must pay £12. At the same time £250 an acre was given for orchards in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. *
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