June 1907.] 



387 



Miscellaneous. 



AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATIONS IN INDIA. 

 (By Mb. H. K. Beauchamp, c.i.e., Editor, "Madras Mail.") 



In countries of the West, and also in Japan, there has taken place, during 

 recent years, a most extraordinary development of organisation and co-operation 

 in agriculture among the cultivating classes themselves, that is, apart from, though 

 supplementing, State organisation and Departments of Agriculture. " The New 

 Agriculture," as it has been not inaptly called, and the effect thereof on both the 

 material and the social conditions of the peoples of these countries, has been described 

 in many most interesting books and pamphlets, the most succinct, comprehensive 

 and instructive of which is, perhaps, " The Organisation of Agriculture " by Mr, 

 Edwin A. Pratt published by John Murray last year, and issued in a third and 

 revised edition, at the price of one shilling, a few months ago. 



It is impossible, within the prescribed limits of an article like the present 

 even to summarise the marvellous records which the New Agriculture has achieved 

 during the past ten years and less in countries so widely differing in agricultural 

 conditions as Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Prance, 

 Belgium, Italy, Holland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Finland, 

 Siberia, Servia, Poland, Luxemburg, Argentina and the United States, all of which 

 will be found detailed in Mr. Pratt's book. In every one of the countries named, 

 Mr. Pratt tells us, there has been an agricultural revival which has led to the 

 spreading throughout each of them of a more or less complete network of agri- 

 cultural organisation, manifesting itself, in varying degrees, in the spread of 

 agricultural education, and in combinations among the agricultural community for 

 an endless variety of purposes, including the virtual transformation of farming 

 methods in accordance with the latest developments of agricultural science ; organi- 

 sations for obtaining agricultural necessaries of reliable qualities at lesser cost ; the 

 purchase in common of costly machinery which would otherwise be beyond the 

 means of a small cultivator ; the formation of Co-operative Societies for purposes 

 both of production and of sale ; the setting up of Agricultural Credit Banks as a 

 means of keeping the farmer out of the hands of the usurer, and enabling him to 

 carry on his operations more successfully ; and the improvement of the individual 

 lot of the agriculturist in many different ways. The special circumstances in which 

 this network of organisation has been developed differ in each particular country 

 and it is a fundamental principle of the movement, regarded as a whole, that not 

 only has each of the countries concerned differed from every other in establishing 

 agricultural organisations suited to its national conditions but the greatest degree 

 of success has been otained where the Associations have been started on a very 

 small scale in rural districts to meet local, or even parochial, conditions, and while 

 maintaining their individual entity, have afterwards combined with other similar 

 bodies to form district, country, or even national Federations for the attainment 

 of common advantages. 



As Japan and everything Japanese is just now attracting the widest and 

 deepest attention in India, let us see what forms the New Agriculture has taken 

 there. This we are enabled to do by studying a Report presented to the United 

 States Government a few months ago by Consul-General Bellows. Now, as regards, 

 " small holdings " agricultural Japan resembles agricultural India in a striking 

 manner. Thus in Japan, fifty-five per cent, of the families engaged in agriculture 

 cultivate less than two acres each, 30 per cent, cultivate from two acres to a little 

 less than three and three-quarter acres, and the remaining 15 per cent, cultivate 

 three and thrree quarter acres or more. Not only, too, are the farms small in 

 themselves, but they are generally made up of different patches of land, so that 

 a farm of two acres may consist of several non-adjacent lots, the average size of a 



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