COUNTRY LIFE Mcnm than one critic of late—in book as
well as newspaper—has attacked the County, once War, Agricultural Committees, for high-handed and ignorant interference with farmers who knew better. I do not propose either to defend or attack ; but I am quite sure that one side of their activities is good and should be perpetuated. They have provided a sort of engineering centre equipped with, all the machines necessary for ploughing, harvesting, manuring, spraying, and the rest. They can there- fore come to the help of any food producer who is too poor or working on too small a scale to buy machinery or too inexpert to use it properly. For example: my orchard trees needed a winter spray. The experts at the County farm relieve me of all the slow, painful and inefficient trouble of hand-spraying, send over a machine, managed by four highly capable maidens, and within an hour at moderate cost the whole of my orchard, standards and bush trees have been cleaned with a tar distillate wash and the once rather mouldy bark gleams like a polished table. The supply of machines and expert workers on similar lines has been he salvation of the farming industry in Russia ; and however different our problems it is allowable to take hints from the Russians or anyone else. Some critics, Mr. Orwin for example, seem to imply in their idealistic schemes for the future of husbandry that mechanisation necessarily in- volves big farms of 6,000 or more acres. A County farm can give the smalkst farmer the full benefit of the machine. Well run, it can prove, for private as well as pro4ession4 producer, the deus ex machina.
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