SMALL HOLDERS.
A good many small holders, dairymen, and poultry keepers have done fairly well ; but, again, no general conclusion can be drawn. It was distressing, for example, to find—on a recent visit to Berkshire—that some of the County Council
small holders, who were good men and had started with high hopes, have been very hard hit by successive collapses in prices, especially in potatoes. The suddenness of variation in profit and loss even in one man's experience is astonishing. On a very highly cultivated farm, close to these depressed small holders, the fanner tells me that he expects to make the really immense sum of £20 an acre on his sugar beet, which is of high sugar content (up to 19 per cent.) and will show a yield of 20 tons to the acre. His wheat will also give a fair profit, for, as with the beet, the yield was high and the quality very high. On the other hand, the potatoes, an excellent crop, are likely to lose a good deal more money than is made on the beet and wheat. Hop growers are only less badly off than potato growers. In all these crops there is irrefutable evidence that what the farmer needs is a standard price ; and that nothing is so disastrous to the industry as abrupt fluctuations. A sudden fall may mean ruin, and drive a good man clean out of the industry and leave the land temporarily derelict. The falls are often unpredictable because they depend on political decisions as well as on the world's supply.
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