COUNTRY LIFE
Another Farmer Speaks " The average inhabitant of this island knows less about soil, on which he depends for his existence, than about wireless-telephony." " Our pre-war imports of food used to run to over k400,000,000 a year, our home production of food was valued (wholesale) at about £250,000,000 a year. There were still many who had insufficient to eat." " The mean rate of soil-formation is estimated at I inch in ro,000 years," yet " the Missouri basin has lost an average of 7 inches of topsoil in twenty-four years, the biggest new Californian desert has advanced in places forty miles in one year, destroying 2,50o farms. Australia is probably going faster than America. . . . Since the last war we have lost soo,000 acres, much of it the best farming- land, to house-schemes and roads . . . gone for ever." Another farmer is speaking: trying to tell his fellow-men, in terms of plain fact and plain common-sense, that the fundamental source of their existence is in danger from ignorance, cynical exploitation, selfish interests, lack of policy, plain stupidity and slackness of heart. He is Mr. G. Goddard Watts, and his pamphlet, An Agricultural Policy for Britain (Allen and Unwin, is.), ought, if it did not happen to be a damning reflection on much official policy for the past twenty years, to be an official pamphlet. I cannot recommend too strongly the excellence of its plea for a thriving agricultural community that is not simply a prosperous industry, but a sociological necessity: a plea addressed to both public and farmers alike, another warning that, unless we are very careful, " British agriculture after the war will experience the same disasters as befell it after the war 1914-18."
Previous page
