With this climate and rich soil there is abundant produce from the land, but very little profit--on agricultural land of mine (apart from buildings) I have been paying close upon £3 an acre in rates and tithe and taxes. During the War the Food Controller found that milk could be produced for two pence a gallon less in the four Western counties than in the rest of England; so he imposed a duty of two pence a gallon on all milk sent out of these four counties, and thereby collected about £250,000. But the Law decided that the duty was illegal; and the money is being returned.
If milk can be produced so cheaply in the West, there ought to be more dairy-farming, and more land should be laid down to permanent pasture. But that is not a popular opinion now. Some acres will produce more food if they are ploughed than if they stay in grass, and perhaps the average acre will, but some acres certainly will not; and though the produce may be more per acre, it may be less per man employed. This is forgotten, and the cry is all for ploughing up. Experienced people will not go ploughing up their pasture; but power may be given someday to a Ministry or Board or Council, which has to lay down general rules and therefore takes the average case regardless of abnormal cases, such as the rich pastures here.
According to the Food Controller’s rules, milk could be produced much cheaper on one farm than on the next adjoining farm, if the county boundary happened to come between the two; and really there were places fifty or a hundred miles inside the boundary where it could not be produced as cheaply as at places just as far outside. No doubt, the line must be drawn somewhere, if there is to be a line at all; but such lines are merely nuisances when they do not represent the facts.
There was a letter of mine on agriculture in the _Times_ of 14 June 1920, and the editor of _Justice_ thereupon sent me a leading-article in his paper of 17 June. I wrote a letter in reply, and he printed it in _Justice_ of 1 July, and afterwards printed other letters from me in reply to things that other people wrote there. These people, of course, were socialists, and one of them was organizer of the Agricultural Workers’ Union. He lamented “the want of knowledge of agriculture in the Socialistic and Labour forces”; but his own facts and figures were very often wrong, and his reasoning was not exact. I shared his aspirations for Utopia; but he was going there across the clouds, and I was going along the land.