PRIMARY RESULTS 69 



which the agricultural labourer has been making, very 

 rightly, for an improvement in his standard of living is 

 driving the employer to a closer consideration of the 

 problem of how to make labour more effective. When 

 wages were low it may have been that the labourer was the 

 cheapest machine, but in proportion as his remuneration 

 approaches more nearly to the standard of reward in 

 competing industries, so will the necessity for making his 

 work more productive be intensified. The value of the 

 output from the farm per man employed is not the only 

 measure by which to gauge the efficiency of the manage- 

 ment, but it is certainly one of primary importance. A man 

 with a spade can dig an acre of land in about two weeks at 

 a cost to-day (1920) of about 4 105. Qd. ; a horseman and 

 a pair of horses can plough an acre in about a day and 

 a half at a cost of about 1 155. Od. ; a farm mechanic 

 on a tractor can break up an acre in about a quarter of 

 a day, and although in the absence of sufficient data the 

 comparison cannot yet be completed by reference to the cost 

 of motor ploughing it is fairly safe to suggest that when 

 all the factors are considered speed, less dependence upon 

 atmospheric and soil conditions, as well as actual cost 

 there will be a still further advantage to be derived by 

 investing the manual worker with the control of mechanical 

 power. Indeed, it seems likely that the solution of the wages 

 problem on the farm will be found in the more general 

 application of machinery to the processes of agricultural 

 production, whereby the output per unit of labour will be 

 increased and higher wage-rates made possible. The 

 tendency in this direction is already noticeable and it 

 demands more serious attention and study than it has 

 received. The national policy in agricultural development 

 is directed towards the breaking up of the large farm into 

 the smaller holdings from which in most cases it has been 

 evolved, thus running counter to the general experience in 

 all industry, namely that cheap commodities and high wages 

 are only procurable under systems of large-scale production. 

 In Sir Thomas Middleton's well-known work, The Recent 



