MORE ROADSIDE MARKETS.
Accounts reach me from several very different countries of the extraordinarily rapid advance of roadside sales by farmers and gardeners. The method is becoming con- spicuous in France and Germany. In the United States some farmers are laying themselves out for this sort of marketing ; and a few, a very few, of our most intelligent producers are changing their crops, changing the very nature of their farms, in order to provide passing motorists with the sort of things they chiefly like to carry back to their town houses. One man is growing summer chrysanthemums or pyrethrums (a plant that has many economic uses) for this sole purpose. Another, who has already profited much from roadside sales, is preparing for next year extra asparagus beds and strawberries. Another, whom I have previously quoted, took last year from his 2,000-acre farm £800 within six weeks from direct sales of fruit, dairy and poultry produce to road travellers. The utter collapse of certain retail prices accelerates this movement. The misfortune is that the worst sufferers—the Lincolnshire potato farmers (now in blank despair and likely to lose £10 an acre at least) and the East Anglian grain farmers, live in more thinly populated and less popular districts where motorists are few, and, indeed,
other markets a little remote. * * *
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