COUNTRY LIFE
Lost Land The report of the Land Utilisation Survey, just issued, shows how, gradually but very surely, first-class agricultural land is being lost to the country. " The land of Britain is the nation's one great ultimate asset," it says, but elsewhere one reads that the acreage under cultivation has declined in the past six years by 1.7 per cent. Most of this decline is due to a complete disregard for the value of the soil as soil, and to its sale and exploitation as building land. It is an easy matter to convert a field to a factory or even a housing estate, but entirely another matter, in time of national emergency, to convert a derelict factory to a field of potatoes. Odd that it should be necessary to save England from the English, but from all sides there comes bitterly ironic evidence that it is so : rich land exploited for building, market-garden areas ruined by the exploitation of gravel. And then an unexpected cause of land-spoliation : the dog. That charming but so often useless animal, it seems, has destroyed, through sheep worrying, whole districts for sheep-farming. There is still another set of figures : although 41 per cent. of the population is on the land in France, 36 in Denmark and 31 in Germany, in England the figure is 7 per cent. I am not surprised at this ; I am only surprised at the complacency, immense but tragic, which allows it ; which also allows the loss, every year, of thousands of acres of English land, rich not only in beauty but in potential food. It is perhaps too much to hope that a nation should take an interest in the beauty of its own earth ; but it might be reasonably expected to take an interest in the possibility, in time of emergency, of starving itself to death.
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