Then there is the labour situation. This year there will be fewer hands to toil, and 

 fewer heads to plan for the food production of Canada. Thousands have gone to the 

 war, for the call to arms has sounded just as insistently in the ears of the farmer, his 

 son and his hired man, as in any others. The farmer is just as willing to go, much more 

 willing than many who have not yet gone and upon whom ties and responsibilities sit 

 more lightly. But still the demands of the farm are inexorable. The farm work 

 must go on, and successfully too, if Canada's credit is to be saved once more, if our 

 military activities are to be financed, if our armies and our own peoples are to be clothed 

 and fed. 



What is the solution for all of this complex problem? To-day the organization for 

 recruiting is more complete that it was a year ago. Its pulling power has been inten- 

 sified. . . There is as much actual need for the inauguration of recruiting plans for 

 agriculture as there is for arms. The worker on the farm, the worker in the munitions 

 factory, can render no bigger or better service to their country than they can render 

 where they are. The time may come when these men may be needed to fill the fighting 

 lines, but they should be amongst the last, not the first, to be called upon. If they are 

 left for the present, they will leave behind them much better economic conditions 

 because they stayed, than could possibly be the case were they to be taken first. And 

 when they do go, the sacrifice will be big, and national prosperity, even efficiency will 

 suffer, and give place to depression, poverty, and want. 



These are facts of national significance. They should not be hid behind, nor 

 buried beneath any other facts, the necessity that our young men should answer the 

 call to defend their country not excepted. That we should furnish soldiers is no more 

 important than that we should have the money and the food and munitions, and that 

 soldiers and munition workers and their families should be furnished and financed and 

 fed. We have got to raise a big crop for 1916. 



Hired help on the farms will be a big problem in the year 1916. Plans for recruiting 

 the forces on the farm should be carefully made, and in this business the farmer in the 

 past has been rather remiss. Usually the initial cost to the farmer for his hired help has 

 been rather light. It's up to our farmers to make permanent provision for the employ- 

 ment of married rather than of single men and to give them the preference wherever 

 possible. 



It is time that this whole problem received much more common sense consideration 

 than it has in the past. Labour for the farms should be a matter of patriotism, at least 

 second to that of recruits for our army corps at the front. 



— From "The Canadian Countryman." 



A military authority has said that any officer can lead his men to fight, but it 

 requires the genius of a General to feed them. There is in this some suggestion of the 

 service rendered the Empire in the grain fields of the Dominion. 



PATRIOTIC PRODUCTION 



Wise farmers will make even more extensive preparations for a big crop in 1916 

 than they did for a big crop in 1915. It is wholly improbable that all exporting countries 

 will again have such favourable growing conditions and such large surpluses of wheat for 

 export as they have raised this year. Nature is scarcely likely to repeat such a phenom- 

 enal universal yield. Some exporting countries, Canada or the United States or India 

 or Argentina, will fall behind, and perhaps several of them will have partial crop failures. 



It may be that the belligerent countries of Europe have managed to harvest 

 fair-sized crops this season, but the terrible destruction of life and the withdrawal of 



27 



