Part 5

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This transcription is complete

should be water supply; it is the main thing. A man cannot get on with his work when he has to spend two or three hours every day watering the stock from a tank every morning. Machinery for farmers should be fixed at a certain price. It is impossible to pay the present prices, and after five or six years he has to start and buy new machines, and I consider that an inquiry should be made into the system of overcharges on machinery supplied to farmers.

(The witness retired)

JOHN CRAIG, Farmer, Kondut, sworn and examined:

6198. To the CHAIRMAN: I have been in this district since 1909 and with my sons I hold about 6,000 acres. Two of my sons were farming for three years at Waroona. I took up approximately 1,500 acres of forest country with some second and third class land. I paid 10s. for the first class and the property is situated from tree to seven miles from the nearest railway siding. We have cleared about 1,500 acres and 1,960 acres are enclosed in a fence. We have three wells and a dam, one of the wells is 30ft. deep and two are 50ft. deep. They are good drinking water. The dam is 1,100 yards and was put down on contract at 1s. 3d. a yard. It is 10 feet deep but is not covered. However, we never use it; we put it down before we struck water with a bore, and never had occasion to draw upon it since. My house is of iron and I have sufficient stable accommodation for the horses, but insufficient covering for my implements. Only two of my drills are covered and the balance is not. I have a full farming plant necessary for present operations and about 13 working horses, two cows, 20 pigs and some poultry. I started with a capital of a littler over £2,000. There are no school facilities within 10 miles and no representations have been made to the Department because of the insufficient number of children. There are no children within five miles of me. The expert staff of the Department of Agriculture so far as I am aware has not assisted us with advice as to the best methods to fallow, except that Mr. Sutton has been, I think, once in the district. If the farmers fallowed there is no doubt that the district would be improved, if they were properly advised. Our nearest medical man resides at Goomalling.

6199. By Mr. CLARKSON: How much drop have you in?—Eight hundred acres. One hundred and fifty acres was fallow, and I believe in fallow, having had previous experience of it, but in the increase of yields a great deal depends upon the season; still, in an average season it should show at least one third more. I fallow from three inches to five inches deep and use 45lbs. of seed to the acre and super. according to the quality of the land. I use 40 to 50 lbs. of super. on heavy land and 70lbs. to 100lbs. on the lighter land. My average yield would not be more than four or five bushels due to the bad season. If we fallowed on the land that I have cleared I would not expect to get anything less than 15 bushels. I think that four bags to the acre would just pay expenses assuming wheat to be worth 10s, a bag and not allowing for our own wages, and I consider it is safer to sow a majority of early wheats, but we would like to be guided by the Government experts in this matter. We use four-furrow mouldboard ploughs and give-furrow discs. There are five horses in the four-furrow plough and sometimes six. There are six horses in the disc. With the mouldboard we do five acres a day and about the same with the disc. The cultivator is a 17 which will do about 15 acres. The disc is a "Mallee King" and cuts about nine feet and does about 18 acres. We use a 13-disc drill and the average per day would be about 12 acres. Our harvester is a reaper-thresher. I have known our men to do 10 acres a day at odd times, but I think the average would be about five or six acres. The reaper-thresher we find satisfactory as it does not waste much wheat. I am not prepared to say, for want of sufficient experience, that bulk handling would be of advantage.

6200. You would not be prepared to say that the farmers should pay duty in order to encourage the local manufacture of implements?—Not if the local manufacturer would sell at reasonable rates, but the higher the duty the higher becomes the price of machinery. Personally I do not believe in the use of very large implements. My crops have never suffered from disease. I pickle for wheat, but I do not grade it. We have not been able to follow the system of rotation of crops so far, nor have we experimented with fodder crops or artificial grasses. Vegetables, however, we can raise fairly well. We keep pigs, but it has taken many years to learn about them. I feed them on a pollard and turn them out for a spell in paddocks. To poultry raising I have not given any attention. We do all our own work and so do not pay wages and work about 72 hours per week exclusive of Sundays. It depends upon the class of land as to what the minimum area a man could make a living out of. I have come to the conclusion that a man cannot work more than 500 to 600 acres single-handed and if he has stock he must have at least 1,000 acres. If he keeps stock and has all sorts of odds and ends of repairs to carry out he could not crop more than 200 to 250 acres. But if he does nothing else but farm work exclusively, he ought to be able to handle 300 acres comfortably.

6201. Working on the system of three years rotation and fallow he would need more than 500 acres?—One thousand acres is the least he could do with. The principle of co-operation applied to farming should be of great advantage, but the difficulty is to compel the farmer to deal with the co-operative society after it is formed. There should be some mode of compulsion. Our land laws appear to me to be very fair indeed.

6202. By Mr. VENN: you do not go in for sheep?—We got rid of them as there were so many kangaroo hunters about the place, and since they went away the few sheep that were left were running about the bush. Unfortunately our capital is so depleted now that we cannot go in for more sheep, but if the Government were to supply to us with ewes on extended terms, I, for one, would be only too please to obtain some as I have any amount of water and nearly 2,000 acres of land netted in. We are getting over-run with weeds and we must have sheep to eat them down. I consider this to be a dairying district for those who care to tackle it and I am confident for those who care to tackle it that it would carry more stock than some of the South-West land if we had conversation of fodder.

6203. If a butter factory was established at Northam would not that be an incentive to the industry?—For us at Kondut Northam would be too far