288 WHEAT PRODUCTION IN NEW ZEALAND 
The farm labour problem has received special con- 
sideration throughout, because 1 am constrained to 
believe that a solution of this question would go far to 
solve the whole wheat question. Though the present 
treatment is preliminary and part of a discussion of 
the general wheat question, I have been tempted, as one 
who has spent much time among rural workers, to 
suggest some improvements; and from a careful study 
of the whole question, combined with practical experi- 
ence, have arrived at certain conclusions of fundamental 
importance, which are set out in Chapters III. and VIII., 
and are supplemented below.* 
In our treatment of problems connected with successful 
cultivation of the soil, we have still many questions to 
investigate. The suitability of different manures to New 
Zealand soils is, rightly speaking, a matter for the agri- 
cultural chemist, whose conclusions should form the 
hypotheses with which a treatment of the question in 
a work of this kind should commence; for the economist, 
as such, is concerned with the physical and natural 
sciences, only in so far as the conclusions arrived at by 
these affect his premises and deductions. 
On the problems of fallowing and irrigation, I had 
collected much information from experimental farms in 
the United States of America and Victoria. As was shown 
in Chapter III., fallowing is important in New Zealand, 
and experience in the United States of America supple- 
ments the important deductions made in the treatment 
given in that Chapter. Experiments carried out in 
California, where the so-called system of ‘‘dry’’ farming 
is in operation, are of particular importance to the dry 
regions in Central Otago, and attention to this question 
there would be well repaid. Irrigation is also a problem 
of vital importance, in that portion of the wheat growing 
area known as the Canterbury Plains. Although several 
*See page 291. 
