156 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY 



In planning villages, foresight is needed in 

 selecting sites for those factories of the future, 

 which, in a well-organised State, should be in 

 the country and not in the congested cities. 

 Unnecessarily costly freightage and deteriora- 

 tion in quality is experienced in the sending of 

 soft fruit from the orchard to the town factory. 

 In transport, this sometimes assumes a ludicrous 

 proportion, such as when large quantities of 

 raspberries are sent from Perthshire to London, 

 or of strawberries from Kent to Aberdeen. 

 Fruit and vegetables are often forwarded from 

 Evesham to London and back to Birmingham 

 or Cardiff. 



Fresh, soft fruit should not be pulped in the 

 Whitechapel Road, but where it is grown, amid 

 the Kentish orchards or the strawberry fields 

 of South Hants. Vegetables should be dried 

 in factories in the districts where vegetables 

 are grown, and sugar extracted in beet-growing 

 districts. Bacon factories should be erected 

 where herds of swine are kept ; and butter 

 redolent of dewy pastures should not be made 

 in the odorous purlieus of Limehouse, but where 

 the air is sweet with the fragrance of vernal 

 grass. Sites, too, must be sought for the 

 foundry where farm implements are to be 

 wrought, and for the sawmill where planks for 

 building and posts for fencing can be ripped. 



The jam and vegetable drying factories and 

 creameries should provide work for women who 



