Home-Grown Wheat
When the Government set out to expand home wheat-growing in 1939 it may be taken that the most profitable wheatland in the country was already under the plough. And as the ploughing orders brought in fresh acreage season by season, each time it was, on the whole, the next most profitable land that was selected. But now that the process has gone on for three seasons, we are getting down to land whose profitability is relatively very low—land where a crop of wheat can indeed be raised, but by comparison with other land can only be raised at a loss. How can farmers be encouraged to plough up such land, and what reasonable guarantee can be given them against the risk? Hitherto there has been only one wheat price for wheat wherever grown, and to establish differential prices for wheat grown on the poorest lands would in practice invol extreme difficulties. The Government have decided instead thereforc to grant next year a subsidy of £3 an acre for all land under wheat. One may consider this as operatifig like a sort of sliding-scale ; the smaller the number of quarters obtained per acre, the larger is the addition to the price per quarter which the £3 represents. As such it is a simple and workable device for its special purpose. Whether under peace conditions such an extreme expansion of arable land could be justified is neithr here nor there. Under war conditions it is one of the most effective modes of saving tonnage that are still open to us.
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