5i8 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— M. 



of workers in agriculture, but they have not lasted long. The present time 

 is one of them, and the question is whether the more attractive alterna- 

 tives offered by the labour market, combined with the mitigation of the 

 consequences of unemployment provided by the social legislation of the 

 times, are going to alter the experience of a century and drive farmers to find 

 ways by which to meet a more permanent withdrawal of labour. 



These might take the forms of (i) an acceptance of the situation and a 

 further extensification of farm practice ; (2) an attempt to carry on with a 

 reduced staff and a further resort to labour-saving machinery, or (3) an 

 intensification of farming, combined with high wages, in an attempt to 

 reproduce industrial conditions. 



Prof. J. A. Scott Watson. — Systems of farjning (10.30). 



Mr. S. J. Wright. — Men and machines {including transport on the 

 farm) (ii.o). 

 Mechanisation is neither a serious menace to our rural amenities nor a 

 royal road to prosperity. It has two phases which, in principle, are quite 

 independent of one another : the elimination of hand labour by such 

 machines as the reaper-binder or the combine harvester ; and the replace- 

 ment of animal by mechanical power. The first of these phases came into 

 being once and for all during the last century, when the forerunners of all 

 modern machines were invented, and a discussion of its desirability to-day 

 can have only an academic interest. The second phase — the introduction 

 of mechanical power — can be discussed from either of two points of view : 

 as a factor which makes it possible to reconcile two general features of modern 

 life, cheaper food and higher wages ; or quite independently of either of 

 these features as a common-sense matter of using the most efficient source of 

 power. Whatever the levels of prices and wages, the farmer who grows 

 food for his own horses could, in theory at any rate, use the same products 

 as fuel for a mechanical heat-engine and get something like three times as 

 much energy from it. Most of the changes for which mechanisation has 

 been blamed are due to purely economic causes, and in the long run, agricul- 

 ture can absorb mechanisation without prejudice to its own interests. 

 Moreover, under present conditions, only the machine can give the agricul- 

 tural worker the leisure and amenities which he is entitled to demand. 



Dr. F. KiDD. — Preservation, storage and transport of farm produce 

 (11.30). 



General Discussion opened by Prof. R. G. White (12.0). 



Afternoon. 

 Visit to University Farm Plant Breeding Institute, Potato Virus Re- 

 search Station. 



Friday, August 19. 



Presidential Address by Prof. R. G. Stapledon, C.B.E., on Ley farming 

 and a long term agricultural policy (lo.o). (See p. 245.) 



Dr. W. G. Ogg.- — Problems of marginal and waste land (ii.o). 



A great deal of land which was at one time under cultivation has been 

 allowed to revert to semi-waste, and every agricultural depression sees 



