Farming Policy Scarcely a week passes without a report from
somewhere in England that " this branch (i.e., the N.F.U.) deplores the attitude of complacent self-satisfaction displayed in the House of Commons with regard to agricultural policy." Certainly that policy must strike many farmers as one of strange contradictions. In summer, for example, fruit-farmers were promised a fixed minimum of £8 per ton for plums ; they succeeded eventually in making the equivalent of six and eightpence. In autumn arable farmers are asked to grow more food ; before autumn gives way to winter they are informed that an intensified call-up will take more and more men from the land. For the second time in twelve months they are asked to plough up more pasture, the suitability of that pasture for arable crops rarely being taken into account. Much converted pasture yielded grain crops during the past summer that were a fiasco ; yet every day one hears of poor and inferior land being ploughed under compulsion. A quarter of a century ago farmers blasphemed against just these same things.
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