30 DECEMBER 1932, Page 13

Country Life

THE MILKER'S ROBOT.

Farming is, of course, depressed ; and m my farmers are to all intents and purposes bankrupt. More than this : mortgages on their land are of small value since the value of the soil itself has reached almost the vanishing point. At the same time, nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the gloom we can muster, British farming was never more vital and vigorous. In a very depressed area, vary familiar to me, when one landlord says he loses 30s. a year on every acre he owns and many score of acres are so derelict that you can scarcely walk across them without stilts, two farmers not only flourish : they have introduced at much expense electrical apparatus and built sheds which have become a factory. In one two men and a boy can milk eighty cows within an hour and a half ; and mechanization—in dairy work not in the more loudly advertised work on tilths—is as efficiently conducted as in any factory and good wages are paid to the benefit both of employer and worker.

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