MINTTKS OF EVIDENCE!. 



51 



17 September, 1919.] 



MK. H. AKMOUR and MR. G. G. MERCER. 



\Ctrntinned. 



going to be, as you and I anticipate, ultimately a 

 great fall in prices, you will easily see that Parlia- 

 ment cannot ffc a, fixed guarantee "for five years? 

 Xo ; not the price. 



10,488. You have suggested in your evidence that 

 it should be fixed yearly? Yes. 



1(1,489. You know that this Commission is appointed 

 to try to arrive at a price, if \ve decide on a 

 guarantee at all. How on earth can any Commission 

 fix it. unless you fix the basis on which it is to be 

 fixed? I see difficulty in it. There is a difficulty in 

 fixing prices altogether. 



10,490-91. If you leave it to a Government Depart- 

 ment, that leaves it to the Government of the day 

 to fix. If you leave it to an independent body over 

 whom nobody has any control, it is hardly a practic- 

 able proposition unless you lay down the basis on 

 which you fix it. Do you agree with that? Yes, I 

 agree. 



10,492. Has your Chamber considered any basis on 

 which it ought to be fixed? No, we have not. 



Kl.4!).'i. Has your Chamber considered as to whether 

 it is possible to make the guarantee on a sliding 

 scale? No. 



10,494. You have not gone into it very deeply? 

 We have had very little to do with it, and the 

 evidence has been got up very hurriedly, and that 

 was not brought under our notice at all. We thought 

 that the Commission would be able to guide us in 

 that mutter. When you produce your figure, no 

 doubt we shall be able to criticise it. 



10.49.~i. Yon are in the trade or the industry, and, 

 if I may say so. I think you put the cart before the 

 hoixc. You are the practic-il men in the industry, 

 and we have to hear what everylxxly has to say and 

 decide on il? I am afraid I am not a practical man 

 in fixing the prices. I have only to take the market 

 price. 



10.490. \Ve do not propose to fix the market price. 

 We only pro]i.se to fix a minimum, <i guaranteed 

 prici- : but you have not considered that at all? No, 

 we have not. 



In. 497. I assume you have not considered either as 

 to whether it is possible that the guaranteed price 

 might be made to slide, according to the wages? If 

 would require to lie. 



10.49M. If some scheme like that could be evolved, 

 would that be a satisfactory result for the industry ? 



I -. no objection to it. I think it would be satis- 

 factory; that there would be a sliding scale, according 

 to the cost of production : and if wages are to go up, 

 then naturally the prices ought to go up; and if 

 they an- to come down, then the prices ought to come 

 down. I think the prices must have some relative 

 proportion to the cost of production. 



10.499. leaving it to be fixed every year, 

 independently of any fixed rule, seems to me to leave 

 the industry in more chaos than it has been in in the 



t'ew years. You ciimmi suggest any basis on 

 which it can lie fixed on a .sliding scale, can you? 

 I am sorry I cannot. 



10.500. The only other thing is that the land in 

 Scotland is all more or less of the same quality, is 

 it not? N"o : it varies very much in quality. 



ID, 501. But it can all be ploughed by two horses? 



Most of it. yes. 



10.502. Can you tell me. if you fix a guarantee, 

 whether there is any way of avoiding the consequence 

 that the farmers of the richer and the better land 

 would gain more than tile farmers of the poorer land? 



Not except by taxation. 



10,50.'). That is the only suggestion you can make 

 a- to that? V.-s 



10.501. Mi .l.i/i '.i/: \Yhat are the main products 

 <'ii your farm besides the cereals you have quoted 

 here? The in:iii products arc cereals wheat, oats, 

 and barley. 



10.505. Do you feed any mutton on your root crops? 

 Sometime*. 



10.506. And beef in the stalls'? Yes. 



10.507. I understood you to say, in answer to Mr. 

 Duncan, that your beet never paid you? I do not 

 say never paid, but I say as a general rule it does 

 not pay, and I might almost say in five cases out 

 of six it loaves no money to the farmer feeding 

 beef. 



2.-.831 



10.508. Is that true in the case of mutton? Yes, 

 it applies to mutton, too. 



10.509. Do you grow potatoes on the farm? Y'es. 



10.510. Then the position is this : that for the 

 profit on the farm you rely on your cereals and 

 potatoes? We do; and hay. 



10.511. How much hay would you be able to sell, 

 for instance, when you are growing 46j acres, and 

 have some horses? It varies. That does not repre- 

 sent exactly the rotation it was in 1915, because we 

 have all b?en growing more cereals in Scotland. We 

 have been advised to produce more cereals. 



10.512. Did the hay do well? Hay pays well enough 

 this year. 



10.513. Did it pay well under pre-war conditions, 

 and at pre-war prices? No, it was not a very good 

 paying thing in pre-war days. 



10.514. Because, looking at the figures for the pre- 

 war season, one would imagine that if the main pro- 

 ducts were cereals and you had not got any profit 

 on your beef or mutton, you would have very little 

 profit on the farm? Before the war we had very 

 little profit. 



10.515. You could not tell us what percentage it 

 would represent on the capital? I am sorry I cannot. 



10.516. You have been asked some questions about 

 your general method of costing by taking the total 

 costs of manure, labour, and horse labour, and spread- 

 ing them over the total acreage of land. I take it 

 your general impression is, that it is a much more 

 reliable method of procedure than to state the number 

 of hypothetical operations and price those? Yes. 



10.517. I am inclined to agree. Tender those cir- 

 cumstances, would not it have been advisable, in your 

 view, to have distributed the cost rather differently 

 between, say. the wheat, the barley, and the oats 

 on one hand or even between those three and between 

 the potato crop and the root crop on the other? 

 I could not do that. I had no means of allocation, 

 otherwise it would have been very misleading. I 

 could only make the statement I have made again, 

 that the potato crop is the most expensive crop and 

 the hay crop is the least expensive; so that you must 

 apply what you save in making hay in labour, and 

 carry it over to the potato crop. 



10.5H. Yes. that more or less balances; but if you 

 use this method for arriving at a basis for calculat- 

 ing what minimum you require, are you not rather 

 doing an injustice to your cereal crops, because your 

 potato crop, for instance, would require much more 

 horse power and much more manual labour, and, on 

 the other hand, your receipts for your potato crop 

 would be much higher per acre than for your cereal 

 crop?- Yes; but on the other hand, whereas cereal 

 crops get the benefit from the green crops, that ought 

 to )H> taken into consideration too. So that you would 

 require to credit the green crops with so much of the 

 cleaning operations that benefit your grain crop. 



10.519. That brings me to one or two questions I 

 w isb to put to you. What, exactly, does dung ex- 

 haustion mean in these tables? It means that you 

 give so much dung to your |x>tato crop. That is the 

 way we do it in Scotland. Then the wheat follows, 

 and it naturally follows that if the wheat is the first 

 crop after the crop that has received the farmyard 

 manure, it takes a greater quantity of it, and leaves 

 less for the succeeding crops. 



10.520. I understand the principle. From what I 

 can see from your table, you credit your cereal crops 

 with the total value of all the straw, do you not? 

 Yes, I credit the cereal crop with straw, according to 

 its value. 



10.521. But surely you would not get much more 

 than .'i~ cwt. of straw on the wheat crop? We get, 

 as I have stated, 35 cwt. 



10.522. But that is the whole of the straw crop? 

 Yes. 



10.523. And you credit the whole of the straw crop 

 to the wheat? Yes, I do. 



10.524. At market prices? At market prices, as 

 near as I can arrive at them. 



10.525. Supposing you are calculating, as I expect 

 you have calculated, the cost of feeding your beef, 

 would you debit them with the straw at market 



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