Professor Johnston: I must say that I have listened with great interest and much appreciation to the very vigorous speech which Senator Quirke has made, in the course of which he gave us a vigorous defence of Government policy with regard to wheat and a vigorous advocacy of the claims of the horse. With the second part of his speech I must confess I have a certain sympathy. But a defence so vigorous seems to call for an indictment of some kind. I think, generally speaking, the indictment should precede the defence.

In this case I feel inclined to supply the deficiency by making a few remarks which may sound rather like an indictment of something or other, but I am not at all sure what it is I would like to indict, whether it he government policy with regard to wheat and other agricultural matters in the last ten years, or the perennial cussedness and lack of adaptability of the Irish farmer, or whether it be the notorious failure of me and the likes of me to educate my fellow-countrymen in the way of economic wisdom. In fact, I feel inclined to take upon myself and the likes of me -- in which I may include my colleague, Senator 0 Buachalla -- full responsibility for failing in the process of so educating our fellow-countrymen.

I hesitate to speak in a purely destructive way, because I am a good enough democrat to believe in freedom of criticism, and yet I feel that criticism, as such, is liable to bring the Government into disrepute, while at the same time, as a good democrat, in a time of national emergency I would hesitate to bring the Government as such into disrepute: so I will try to steer as straight a course as I can between those two opposing considerations.

If I were to say nasty things about Government policy in the matter of wheat and other agricultural matters, I would be inclined to say that their whole procedure in the last ten years reminds me of a quack doctor who goes about equipped with a bag of rather dangerous drugs, all of them poison, but some of them, fortunately, antidotes to the effect which others have. After applying one drug and observing the patient in a state of distress, the Government, by a kind of silent instinct rather than by any conscious wisdom, has occasionally applied the antidote drug and the patient has hitherto managed to survive by the process of being poisoned and anti-poisoned in successive doses.

That may or may not be a fair description of Government economic policy in the matter of wheat and other things, but I hope to illustrate more concretely the application of that parable to wheat. Perhaps I might say their whole procedure over a number of years reminds me of the American doctor who was called in to examine a patient. After examining the patient the doctor said. "I do not in the least know what is wrong with you, but take this powder, it will give you fits, and I am hell on fits". We have been taking powders and we have been having various policies advocated and carried out with reference to wheat, and the fact remains that we now stand in serious danger of starvation in the course of the next few months. Looking at it from a purely academic point of view, I would say it is a national disgrace that in a country where agriculture is the primary industry, and having land which is on the whole about the most fertile land of its kind in Europe, we should be faced with the danger of anything approximating to national starvation, or even of the loss of such an important element in our foodstuffs as wheat.

We have 12,000,000 acres of agricultural land -- 12,000,000 acres of crops and pasture -- in the country. I have seen somewhere a statement that 500 acres of average land, well and adequately cultivated, is enough to provide 1,000 people with all the requisites of a complete diet. If that be so, it would follow, arithmetically speaking, that 1,500,000 acres of agricultural land, as good as our land is on the average, should be enough to supply 3,000,000 people with all the requisites of a complete diet.

Actually we find that in normal times we seem to need or use about 6,000,000 acres of our agricultural land in providing food for ourselves, and only the produce of the other 6,000,000 acres is available for the production of export products. But if our agriculture had reached the degree of efficiency which it should have reached by this time, I would say that we should be able to feed our 3,000,000 people quite adequately with the produce of 3,000,000 or 4,000,000 acres of land and have produce of the rest available for export. Apparently, however, having all our land to play with, and having slipped by degrees -- well, not completely, but to a certain extent -- out of the export market altogether, we now find ourselves in considerable danger of not being able to provide ourselves with an adequate diet.

Now, much has been said about the price of wheat and the relation between the price proposed for wheat and the area which would he cultivated to wheat, but surely it is elementary that different grades of land, from the point of view of wheat production, require different prices if the owners of those grades of land are going to bring them under wheat cultivation.

If the Government had fixed a price of, say 30/- a barrel, it is possible that there are certain portions of land in the country which it would have paid the owners to grow wheat on, even for as low a price as 30/- a barrel. At a price of 35/- a barrel rather more land would have been cultivated to wheat, and so on, until we come up to whatever price is necessary in order to bring about, by means of a price inducement, the cultivation of what the economists would call the marginal portion of wheat land which is necessary to provide ourselves with a complete wheat ration.

I do not know in the least what amount of land the price of 45/- a barrel is going to bring under wheat cultivation, but I do know that a price of 50/- a barrel will probably bring a greater area of land under wheat cultivation than a price of 45/-, and that seems to be the effect that price will have on the area cultivated. If it were purely a question of price, then the Government will have to estimate what area of land a given price will cause the cultivation of, and will have to fix a price high enough to bring about the cultivation of that area of land, and then hope that the produce of that area of land will be sufficient to feed our people with wheat in the coming year.

There are, however, certain matters which I think ought to he adverted to in this connection, because in many ways we are, in this matter of wheat, heirs of the past and of the very recent past. The Government takes pride in the fact that they have had a wheat policy ever since they came into office, and so they had; but their wheat policy reminds me of the story of the man who was "bet" that he would not drink a quart of ale without setting down the tankard from his lips. He took on the bet, and the stakes were duly handed over to the bar-tender. Then he slipped out, came back in about five minutes, and proceeded to take up his tankard and drink his quart, and he won his bet. The other man said: "Well done but what were you doing when you went outside?" He answered. "I went into the pub next door just to see if I could do it."

The point of that story is that from an ordinary point of view the man was less able to drink a second tankard because he had already largely filled himself with the first tankard. Similarly, with regard to the wheat policy, because we grew so much wheat on so much of our land unnecessarily during the years 1932 to 1938, we are now less able to grow as much wheat as we should like to grow and as we need to grow on the land of our country, and if we had grown less wheat in those years we could have grown more and better wheat at less expense for ourselves now.

Another aspect of the wheat policy that was pursued in those years was that it was not based an a solid foundation of profitable livestock agriculture, because it was utterly uneconomic to stall feed cattle then. Nobody outside an asylum was going to spend 3d worth of grain in producing 2d worth of beef. The relationship between the price of oats and beef was such as to make the stall feeding of cattle utterly uneconomic, and, consequently, people who grew wheat in the tillage areas in those years did so without a foundation of stall feeding and consequently, without adequate foundation of farmyard manure. They were able to do so with the help of artificial manures, and in that way were able to turn a cash profit for themselves out of the situation which was created for them in those years.

Now, however, they have got to grow wheat without an adequate supply of artificial manure, and without any tradition in the recent past of adequate stall-feeding, and without adequate farmyard manure, they find themselves faced with the impossibility of growing a proper wheat crop in the tillage areas, and the Government has had to appeal to the farmers in the grass areas to come to the national rescue and plough up their most fertile grass lands with a view to releasing the fertility of that soil in the form of wheat.

Now, there were owners of large grass lands, who were being penalised for being pasture farmers or ranchers during the years 1932 to 1938, who ploughed up portion of their grass lands in those days in order to profit by the guaranteed price for wheat, but, in the events which happened since, the true patriots and the people on whom we must now rely mainly for the national salvation are not the ranchers or owners of these grass lands who ploughed up their grass lands for wheat in the years 1932 to 1938, but the stout fellows who maintained their land in grass, fed bullocks on it during the uneconomic years, and who now have the un-exhausted fertility of that land which they can turn to in the national emergency and upon which they can grow wheat for us all.

Another aspect of inconsistency in Government policies is that while their professed policy has been to encourage the growth of wheat and other tillage crops at all times since they took office, in actual fact another policy of theirs, the policy of dividing up large farms, has had, incidentally, the effect of making us now less able and less adapted to the rapid increase in the cultivation of wheat than we would have been if we had allowed the former number of large farms to continue in existence in the country.

The fact is that wheat is not a crop which suits the economy of the small firmer of 30 acres or less. It is essentially a crop which can be grown on a commercial scale with economy and efficiency only by the farmer of 50 to 100 acres or more.

If you look up the statistics in the official volume Agricultural Statistics 1847 to 1926, you will find on page 121 a comparison of the amount of wheat grown in 1917 on farms of 30 acres or less and the amount grown on farms of 30 acres or more. In 1917 there were 106,000 acres under wheat, and of that total 29,000 acres were grown on farms of 30 acres or less and 77,000 were grown on farms of 30 acres or more. In other words, in those years and, I believe, in these years, wheat growing, if it is to take place it all, must take place, largely if not entirely, on farms of 30 acres or more, and if you analyse the returns of our acreage under wheat I think you will probably find that at least 300,000 of those acres are on farms of 50 acres or more and only about 100,000 on farms of 50 acres or less.

The small farmer has his points, and I am not saying that there is not room in our agricultural economy for farms of every size. In fact, I am saying that there should be farms of all sizes not only in the country as a whole but in every region of the country, because I think our economy as a whole will be stronger and healthier if we have suitable gradations of farms distributed throughout the whole country.

I do not say that it has been the Government policy to harass the owners of large farms as such, and to acquire their land for division among alleged landless men. To the extent to which that policy has succeeded, the Government has created a situation in which less wheat is likely to be cultivated than if they had not pursued that policy.

I am aware of one concrete instance recently in which a farmer on a 500 acre farm in County Louth, who had gone to every trouble and expense acquiring tractors and other machinery, ploughed up a considerable portion of his land in order to play his part in the wheat campaign, had, by a recent decision of the Land Commission, about 300 acres taken from him, with the result that his agricultural activities have been completely disorganised. The land will be divided up at a time when much of our national effort should be devoted to growing wheat, and it is extremely unlikely that that land next year or the year after will grow as much wheat as if it had been left in the undisturbed possession of the former owner.

The fact is that it does not suit the policy of the smallholder to go in, to any serious extent, for a wheat crop. In saying that I speak as a smallholder, the owner of some 20 acres of land. The smallholder is always conscious of a shortage of grass and hay and other food for his animal population. If he extends his cultivation of oats he may have to carry a smaller stock of animals in the summer, but he will at least have the straw and perhaps the cracked oats, if he chooses to use some of it in that way, to feed a larger animal population in the winter time, and, on balance, he will not have to cut down his animal population at all. But, if you ask him to grow two or three acres of wheat on a 20-acre farm, he will not have any straw worth talking about fit to feed to his animals in the winter time, and he will almost certainly have to cut down the number of animals that he carries on his land.

There is the additional consideration that if the small-holder grows an oat crop he need not necessarily plough up the field for oats until the springtime and he has the grazing of that lea field all the previous winter -- even winter grass is a useful thing to have in these days when cattle feeding is short -- whereas if he had to prepare a field for wheat cultivation he would have to plough it up in the previous October and consequently lose the grazing of that portion of his land during the whole of the previous winter, as well as having to face all the problems of bringing it back again into a suitable state of cultivation and laying it down in grass after a suitable rotation in the future.

It is true -- no matter what any expert advising the Taoiseach may say -- that wheat is a more exhausting crop on land than oats, and the smallholder is very wise in taking care not to expand too much his cultivation of wheat, but, if he must increase his cultivation, to specialise in such things as potatoes and oats.

That is the elementary commonsense of the thing from the point of view of the 20 acre farmer and less, and statistics bear out the fact that in a time of national emergency like this the only part of our agriculture which is capable of substantial elasticity of expansion in the way of increasing tillage is that part which is represented by farms of 30 acres or more.

Again referring to Agricultural Statistics 1847 to 1926 you will find on page xlvi an analysis of the percentage increase in the area of land ploughed for every thousand acres of crops and pasture, comparing the results in farms of different sizes for the years 1912 to 1917. In farms of 30 acres or less, between 1912 and 1917, the area ploughed increased by 21%. In farms of 30 to 50 acres the area ploughed increased by 29%. In farms of 50 to 100 acres, the area ploughed increased by 36%. In farms of 100 to 200 acres the area ploughed increased by 47%. In farms of over 200 acres the area ploughed increased by 83%.

Considering that we have now a situation in which the nation's salvation seems to depend on the willingness and ability to exert itself of that section of our agriculture which it has been the policy of the Government to harass almost out of existence in the course of the last ten year, I hope their patriotism will prove equal to the occasion, and I hope the Government will have a more rational outlook on the problems of our agriculture than they possibly had during their first eight or ten unregenerate years.

It is perhaps also appropriate to suggest that, given a somewhat different policy, it would not be out of the question to import the deficiency of our wheat crop by co-operation with our British neighbours, but at the same time I am only too painfully aware that our economic bargaining power in our dealings with our British neighbours is nothing like as strong as it should be, and nothing like as strong as it would have been if a policy of a kind which I would have recommended had been in operation during the last ten years. The economic bargaining power of one nation dealing with another depends on what the nation in question has to sell and on what it would like to get in exchange.

Cathaoirleach. I am afraid the Senator is getting away from the terms of the motion.

Professor Johnston: I am discussing the problem of wheat supplies in general. Is it your ruling, Sir, that I am going beyond the limits of that?

Cathaoirleach: The terms of the motion are very explicit and I have given a good deal of latitude.

Professor Johnston: I would suggest that it is important that we should get, by hook or by crook, enough wheat to feed ourselves; that if we cannot get it by paying 45/- a barrel, then we should he prepared to pay as much as 50/- and if we cannot get it for 50/- we should he prepared to pay 55/-. But we should also he prepared to consider the possibility of getting the additional wheat we might require from other sources besides our own agriculture, especially as our own agriculture has been rendered less capable of producing wheat now than it would have been if it had not produced so much in those years to which I have referred.

I suggest from that point of view that, if we had not reduced ourselves to the position in which we have practically nothing left to export, if our exports of things like pigs, bacon and butter were of more serious importance to our neighbour, then we would have been in a better position in which we might say: "Unless you help us to get wheat we may, unfortunately, be unable to supply you with as much bacon, butter, and so on, as you would like". But, unfortunately, we have not got sufficient of these things to make it of any importance in the eyes of our neighbour, and as to the cattle we have got, they say: "You have to sell them to us anyway, and we know that you cannot do anything else with them", so that they do not constitute any bargaining factor.

I think it would have been altogether preferable if we had pursued the policy of expanding the production of livestock and livestock products during the last ten years, thus giving us a stronger position and a greater bargaining power in export markets, and the possibility, in a time of national emergency, of switching over virgin soil to the production of wheat to whatever extent might he possible, and whatever surplus wheat we could not produce at home we would have been able to obtain by arrangement with our neighbour.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999