1 Apri, 1902.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 243 
soil, will yield far greater returns per acre than wheat-growing. These special 
crops, however, all require more care and skilled labour than cereal-growing ; 
hence, in our opinion, there is a general run on cereal-growing—the lazy man’s 
crop. 
We have been often struck with a curious, antiquated idea prevailing 
amongst the generality of Karroo farmers, that if a man has good ground 
under irrigation, he “ must grow wheat to make his own bread, and thus save 
buying it.” The fact that he would be able, taking one year with another, to 
purchase five bags of wheat by growing lucerne where he would only have 
raised one bag of wheat does not seem to trouble this “grow your own bread”’ 
farmer. We have recently heard of a Cradock farmer with magnificent ground 
and water supply for lucerne-growing, who has been growing wheat year after 
year, and only making a bare living out of it. He was asked recently why he 
did not try lucerne-growing. He replied that he once did have a small patch 
of it in his lands, and found the infernal “‘ boschje”’ a great trouble to eradicate 
from his wheat lands! He is probably still busy irrigating wheat crops for 
locusts and rust spores. It is the wacertainty about cereal-growing in the 
Karroo that knocks the bottom out of it. If the fruitless expenses of the 
years of failure be taken into account, the occasional successful crop that is. 
reaped has generally cost as much or more than it sellsfor. We repeat that in 
cereal-growing the expense is exactly the same whether a crop is reaped or- 
nothing is reaped. If a proper profit and loss account were kept over, say, seven 
years of wheat-growing in the Karroo, it would be more readily seen by 
farmers how poor the average return is, and how much better it would pay 
them to turn their valuable lands over to the use and support of their live 
stock. Instead of doing this, however, with the perversity of human nature, they 
go on, year after year, grumbling at the “rottenness of agriculture,” while at 
the same time allowing hundreds and often thousands of pounds worth of 
yaluable stuck to perish for want of food in droughts around the very borders 
of their grain lands, inside of which a rust-eaten crop of wheat stands bleaching 
and withering and worthless. Often the crop reaped would not pay for the 
hides of the stock that have been allowed to perish outside the fence, because 
inside the fence that blessed cereal crop was standing on the ground, the half 
of which would have produced fodder enough to have saved every head of stock 
from perishing from want of food. Good ground under irrigation in the 
Karroo is far too valuable to sow year after year with wheat, barley, oats, 
mealies, and pumpkins. 
LuceERNE FOR THE KARRoO. 
The growing of cereals should be left to those parts of this colony and 
neighbouring States where they can be grown wholesale upon the slopes and 
hillsides for miles and miles at a stretch, without artificial watering, and 
depending solely upon seasonable rainfall. Regions blessed with these natural 
features are naturally adapted to cereal-growing. These features are possessed by 
some of the coast districts of the Western Province—Malmesbury and Koeberg 
districts, for instance-—and some of the coast districts of the Eastern Province, 
and also the conquered territory in the Free State. The arid Karroo does not 
ossess them, and, instead of trying to coerce the Karroo into grain-producing, 
it should be made to carry crops more suitable to its peculiarities of climate, 
soil, and rainfall. Lucerne is just one of those crops. Where lucerne won’t 
grow in the Karroo, cereals certainly will not. Cereals cannot, generally 
speaking, be grown in the Karroo without irrigation. Irrigation means the 
construction of weirs, dams, furrows ; levelling and grading of lands, and the 
yearly maintenance of all these works. Wheat can be grown in such quantity, 
and so cheaply in the natural wheat regions just referred to, that the wheat 
grown under irrigation in the Karroo cannot profitably compete. We grant 
that it pays the Karroo grower of irrigated wheat better to grow wheat during 
a succession of years of drought than it does during good years, because wheat 
is then a better price, but this state of affairs at best is merely temporary, being 
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