18 FARMING ON FACTORY LINES 



farmer who has, during recent years, given up tillage 

 in favour of pastoral farming — they are numerous 

 enough — when and under what conditions he 

 determined to make the change. Invariably the 

 answer will be to the effect that it occurred at a time 

 like the spring of the present year, when, owing to 

 bad weather conditions, he and his men and horses 

 were passing through a period of enforced idleness, 

 or when, worse still, after a good year, bad harvest 

 weather had resulted in the partial or entire 

 destruction of bountiful crops. 



It is not the dull-minded phlegmatic farmer who is 

 the first to decide on a change during what, in the 

 descriptive language of the Irish farmer, are known 

 as " heart-scalding times." It is the highly-strung 

 man, the man of enterprise, of brains, of energy, 

 who chafes most, and whose temperament can least 

 stand expensive idle times or the financial loss of a 

 destroyed harvest. Too often, with such a man, the 

 change has been from tillage farming, with its many 

 mind-occupying variations, to grass farming, with its 

 dull, weary monotony, which a person of even 

 average temperament finds too irksome, with the 

 result that sooner or later farming is finally forsaken. 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 



It is well for those who are now chafing over our 

 decadent agriculture to keep these things in mind, 

 and to realise that our past agricultural policy has 

 been of such a nature as to result in the survival of 

 the unfit. They, who until recently never gave the 

 subject of agriculture a second thought, may bemoan 

 our depleted agricultural life, and lament over the 

 tendency of agriculturists " to stick in the mud," but 

 these things are not matters of such great wonder- 



