I want to refer to a matter relating to this industry which is of very great urgency. We have a strong advertising campaign going on in connection with wheat growing. We have a strong advertising campaign going on in connection with beet growing and the fancy price of 60/- per ton is being paid for beet. Quite apart from the merits of these schemes, which I do not now propose to discuss—my views regarding them are pretty well known and I do not desire to retreat a fraction of an inch from the position I took up on previous occasions—may I put it to the Minister that the one crop which is of vital and urgent necessity to us is barley—feeding barley. No crop except, perhaps oats, can be used more profitably at present for the community as a whole or from the point of view of the national income than barley, converted into feeding stuffs for pigs. No emphasis is being laid on the necessity for growing barley or oats.
Heretofore, barley in this country has been primarily grown by people aiming at the maltster. They hoped to get their barley taken by the maltster and to get the maltster's price. But they were prepared, if they did not make the grade for malting, to use it for feeding stuffs. If you are aiming at malting barley one of the brands which can be used is Archer Spratt, which, I understand, will produce one of the finest samples available. There are other varieties of barley which, I understand, are very much hardier and very much less prone to being "lodged" in our western districts, where we have very high moisture, a very high rainfall and very often an unsettled autumn. I urge very strongly that the Minister should call up his agricultural instructors—he will find amongst them some of the ablest practicable men in the country—and get a cross section of their view as to what is the most suitable form of barley to be grown primarily for feeding stuffs, and then to address some kind of allocution to those parts of the country, which normally will not grow barley for malting purposes, to get supplies of these hardy types of barley and grow them for the purpose of providing feeding stuffs for pigs.
There is another point that I should like to put to the Minister. Heretofore, the growing of oats and barley has become associated in the minds of the people with very violent fluctuations and often it is only with extreme difficulty that they can be converted into cash crops in the Autumn. Now, I do not believe in the cash crop system in our agricultural economy at all. I think it has been the curse of our Irish agricultural economy in the way in which it has been operated. However, I am not going to enter into that now, but we have to face the fact that our people have been taught for the last seven years to relish cash crops and to seek for them, and having been induced to go into the production of wheat and beet, both of which are cash crops, you have now got to persuade our people more or less to go away from these crops and to go in, for the common good, for the production of an adequate supply of live stock. I submit to the Minister that, if he apprehends a shortage of maize next Autumn, he may say with perfect safety that he will guarantee to anybody who wants to sell feeding barley the price that he would pay for maize, whatever it is. Now, that will not sound a very attractive price to the man who has spent his life in selling barley to the maltsters, but this is feeding barley—barley that would be unsuitable for the maltsters—and if the grower of that barley has the certainty that the Minister will take it off his hands next Autumn at, say, 10/- or 12/- a cwt., I believe that a penny would not be lost thereby because he would be buying it as cheaply as maize, and there will not be a sufficiency of maize in any case. I am prepared to state, as an experienced shop-keeper dealing with country people, that we will be able to sell at least one-third of the total requirements of feeding stuffs in straight barley meal, with no mixture, and I would say that we would be prepared to accept with readiness an arrangement similar to the sugar rationing scheme that existed during the last war, where we were required to take 1 cwt. of brown sugar to five cwt. of white sugar, and I am sure that I would be able to dispose of one cwt. of barley meal for, say, every three cwts. of Indian meal, and could do it without any subsidy or without loss.
There is no risk whatever in giving that guarantee. I doubt if even 1 per cent. of the people who ordinarily grow barley would avail of it, but it would remove that apprehension in the minds of people, who have not been in the habit of growing barley, which might deter them from planting barley this season fearing that it would be left on their hands. Therefore, if we are to get back into the production of pigs with the rapidity which is so desirable under existing circumstances, I urge the Minister to take effective measures now to secure the production of adequate quantities of barley as pig feeding next autumn and in the time hereafter.
