Food and the Ploughing-up Policy
On the Minister of Agriculture's statement that there were 53,000 tractors in the United Kingdom at the outbreak of war and that 17,000 more will have come into use by the summer, a rather disturbing criticism is offered in a letter to The Times by Mr. S. J. Wright, Director of the Institute for Research in Agricultural Engineering at Oxford. On the basis of a careful inquiry he estimates that at least 12,000 of the existing tractors are overdue for replacement and that of the new tractors about 9,000 would have been bought if there had been no war. The upshot is that he cannot see any addition to our tractor strength equal to the task of dealing with 2,000,000 extra acres of arable land. This is an important commentary on the very pessimistic account of the Government's agricultural programme by Mr. A. P. McDougall, published in The Times last week. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith may be right in maintaining that Mr. McDougall, in calculating the additional output resulting from the turn-over from grass-land to arable, has under- estimated the production of the foods we need most in war-time, but has not met his other charges—that the Board has concentrated too exclusively on ploughing up, that it has given little attention to increasing the output of existing arable and grass-lands, and that it has not shown how the harvests from the newly-ploughed acres are to be handled without more tractors than there are, more trained drivers, more harvesters, more threshing machines
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