COUNTRY LIFE
Idle Land
Between the war of 1914 and that of 1940 the acreage of land lost to cultivation in this country was very great. Much of this loss is also irreparable ; gravel pits, building estates, factories, aerodromes and so on stand on sites once occupied by crops. No subsidy, how- ever high, could reclaim this land for the plough. There still exists, however, a large acreage of land which is agricultural in character, but which yields no agricultural return. Much of this land exists almost solely for the protection of the amenities of private houses. One of the commonest reasons for the private ownership of a few acres of land is "so that nobody else shall build in front of us." This fear of being overlooked must be responsible for many thousands of acres of land having no other than a purely symbolic purpose. In my own district I can think of half a dozen examples of such land. In one case a fifty-acre section of the finest virgin parldand has lain idle and derelict, hideous with clumps of fallen timber, for fifteen years. It is never used, or cropped ; it exists for no other purpose than to preserve a view. Until such land, of which it is estimated there are at least 8,000,000 acres, is forcibly taken over, put to agri- cultural use, and redeemed from an impossible idleness, much of the talk of a drive for a hundred-per-cent, agricultural output loses its point.
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