76 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



it certainly was a wasteful one — killing the hen which was 

 to lay the eggs. Attempts to reduce the labour bill were 

 carried to an extravagant length. It was a melancholy 

 thing to see — as I did in company with two well-known 

 Sussex land-agents — ^the experiment which — purely as an 

 experiment — Mr. Faunce de Laune carried out on his pro- 

 perty of Sharsted Court in Kent, of leaving a field of grass 

 — good grass, too — to rot on the stem, merely to see how 

 the account would stand, supposing that, for the sake of 

 saving labour, grass were not cut, but allowed to decay into 

 mud, so as to manure the ground. The conversion of 

 3,700,000 acres of arable into pasture certainly meant a 

 tremendous loss in annual output — all the more as we 

 know things now, and the many have at length learnt, 

 how very much more, even food for their live stock, arable 

 land will produce than pasture. And letting labour go 

 meant depriving Agriculture of the best instrument for 

 productive working. Saving outgoings also must needs 

 mean letting even what arable land remains fall into a 

 deteriorated state. And that is what has come about. 

 Rightly enough did Lord Crawford, when President of the 

 Board of Agriculture, observe : " Shortage of Labour 

 means bad cultivation, and bad cultivation means bad 

 yield. It also means that it will take two or three years, 

 and in some cases four years, before the quality of the soil 

 can be re-hearted." In the same sense Mr. Prothero 

 has since said at Exeter : " Labour is the key to the whole 

 trouble." 



In this way our Agriculture has sunk into the proverbial 

 " slough of Despond." There was no need for it. " There 

 is still a very substantial profit in arable land," so wrote 

 Mr. A. D. Hall as late as in 1916, with wheat and barley 

 at the prices assumed — viz., severally wheat at 36s., and 

 barley at 32s. And again : 



"In every part of the country we may see instances of the 

 way a really knowledgeable farmer on the look out for oppor- 

 tunities makes successful departures from the ordinary routine 

 of his business and obtains general average of profit far higher 

 than that set out in the typical case quoted." 



