24 DECEMBER 1927, Page 13

Country Life

A DAIRY TRIUMPH.

If anyone wishes to focus the chief problems of husbandry in England to-day he should go to Marlborough or its neigh- bourhood. Up on the neighbour downs is a most lamentable landscape, where a good deal less than Goldsmith's "Half a tillage mocks the smiling plain."

Land once well cultivated is now a prairie. Houses, out- buildings, hedges—all the equipment of farming have given place to emptiness ; and one man on a horse does the work of a score or two of labourers. Happily excesses breed their own remedies ; and in that neighbourhood is to-day being practised a new system of farming that has been exciting farmers and critics beyond recent parallel. Pilgrims are coming even from overseas to learn the secret.