I have seen it myself, going around the country. The Minister will have to admit that there has been a lot of consolidation of holdings in the western areas. The small holdings which belonged to people who emigrated or to others who died are being consolidated and to a greater extent than can be coped with by the Land Commission. I have seen it myself when going through the areas and the facts have been pointed out to me. This problem, in the main created by emigration from the western areas, is common to all Governments; it is a problem to be faced by all of us.
It is a serious problem. But there are signs of hope for the future. A great deal of use has been made of the schemes administered by the Department. There has been a heartening, even though small, increase in production. Farmers have been reconstructing their premises and their out-offices. Land reclamation and drainage have been proceeding and I think that the greatest hope we can see for the future is that in every area and in every county you will find one farmer who will produce more than twice as much as his neighbour. That farmer is a shining example and, as I say, that situation is not confined to one county or to one area. What is needed to bring about a vast general improvement is a technological revolution in farming methods.
No one needs be despondent, because improvement can be seen; there has been very manifest and striking improvement. We know from our various constituencies that there is locked up in the soil of this country the fertility value which would amount to £100,000,000 per annum. It is being availed of to a great extent but an enormous lot has to be done if we are to achieve the best than can be achieved.
That brings me to ways and means of improving agricultural production. These do not happen to relate to anything that might be called matters of political dispute but purely to questions of organisation. First of all, I think we need a change in regard to the methods of propaganda we use.
The Department of Agriculture has many excellent schemes. Its propaganda, of a type, is excellent but because it is a Government Department, subject to the personal direction of a Minister, it is not likely to use the most modern methods of propaganda. You will never see advertisements issued by it with value and volume symbols, the difficulty being that it is hard for a Department to guarantee any figures and from the standpoint of modern public relations practices the advertising done by the Department is utterly dull and uninteresting.
You will very rarely see advertising of the kind which would be recommended by a group of public relation officers who had a first-class expert knowledge of their subject and I think myself it is true to say that without a reorganisation of the public relations side of the Department it would be hard to ask the officers to make any striking changes in their methods of propaganda.
That brings me to another matter. We are in the year 1955 and we have not yet established any number of pilot farms run by the farmers themselves with the help of the Department where accounts are published and where the progress that can be made can be seen by all the farmers. We are a conservative people and I think it would be rather difficult to get the farmers to co-operate in that way but it is my belief that if a proper effort were made and that if the farmers' organisations like Macra na Feirme and the new farmers' organisation were asked to co-operate it should be possible to run many pilot farms. I believe there are one or two already but it has been found in Holland and Denmark that the greatest benefits accrue from demonstrations designed to show the advantages of modern methods. It should be possible to have pilot farms run for farmers of every size who would be able to visit these farms and see what the results are.
I refuse to see how such pilot farms would be too expensive to run initially. The money would be well spent and I believe there should not be just a few but 3,000 or 4,000 of these farms run in this way, run by the owners themselves who would accept voluntarily in the beginning the advice given by the Department, and where accounts would be kept. The demonstration plots, of which there are many in the country, have a certain effect, but I have heard farmers say that they operate in vacuo and that it is not the same thing as if a farmer had to spend additional working capital in face of all the difficulties and the problems and the hazards of the weather. As a result demonstration plots have not the success we would like them to have.
The demonstration farm at Johnstown Castle showing the advantages of the application of fertilisers to grassland has been effective to a certain degree and the excursions of such organisations as Macra na Feirme to Johnstown Castle have been very useful but a great deal more needs to be done in that direction. I learned from the Minister that only 72 lectures were given in a year accompanied by films. I may be wrong but I think there should be a complete film unit operated by the Department of Agriculture. In Denmark the people voluntarily pay a small tax of a penny or twopence on cinema seats and they collect £135,000 a year in that way. They have four private film companies who provide films on Danish history, civics and agriculture.
They also provide technical films for agricultural use and it seems extraordinary that the Danes can have four or five film companies doing valuable work and that we have not got a single film unit to make films to assist the Department of Agriculture advisers in giving classes. My own belief is that the use of films and probably in future of television is an absolutely essential part of an instruction, that it should be a far more frequent feature of the lectures given by our advisers.
I note in that connection that, although there are something like over 400,000 people who are concerned with agriculture, the total number of persons attending classes for elementary instruction in soil mechanics, botany and so forth and farming is 4,600 in the year and that about the same number attend the rural science classes in the vocational education schools. That number is the lowest of any country in Western Europe and the very small number needs explanation. I refuse to believe that the younger community, particularly now that they have extra classes under Macra na Feirme auspices, are unwilling to study a subject which has now become so complex that one may say there are almost as many innovations in farming as there have been, for example, in the radio world starting off with Marconi and ending with television. I refuse to believe that, if a great effort was made to popularise education, both theoretical and practical, a very much larger number of farmers' sons would not attend these classes.
The difficulty seems to be to break the vicious circle of lack of incentive and a lack, perhaps, of imagination in what is offered by the Department. I believe the vicious circle can be broken and should be broken.
I suppose the Minister for Agriculture would agree with me that only about 25 per cent. of the knowledge required for modern farming can be inherited these days. The rest of it is highly technical in character and has been changing rapidly in the last 20 years and the amount a person can inherit in the way of knowledge to run a farm is far less than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
Of course, speaking of the public relations end of the Department's work, the Department is assisted by advertisements by private firms but, as I said, I still feel that a great deal more can be done to make the advertising interesting. To give a specific example, in my own constituency, when the urgent necessity of changing from the pork pig to the bacon pig became evident, I would say from the standpoint of modern public relations, the propaganda effort made by the Department to persuade the farmers as to what they should do was totally inadequate. I am not saying that any particular Minister was responsible for that. I am simply saying that the conception of modern public relations is not what it should be. We have very far to go before that whole conception is up to the standards which are desirable.
I am aware of the fact that propaganda must be concentrated; it must be interesting and not didactic. It can only be persuasive. The idea of telling farmers that they should do a thing— the didactic way—is hopeless. It must be interesting and sympathetic. I understand all those things. I understand that advertising and public relations between the Department and the farmers provide a difficult problem. It is not easy to do the right thing. It is not easy to prepare propaganda in the right form. Nothing would be more useless than a vast increase in propaganda of a purely didactic character. It would be utterly hopeless and the farmers would be quite right in deriding it and ignoring it. Nevertheless, the problem remains.
Passing to the whole question of the agricultural advisory services and the proposed initiation of an agricultural institute for research, I would say the agricultural advisers do excellent work. We all of us recognise that. Farmers are the first to pay tremendous tribute to the work they do. Some of them go far beyond their ordinary hours in giving farmers advice and helping them with the many problems they have to face. But, there again, in relation to their work, the agricultural committees, however well they may perform their functions, are mainly administrative bodies and there is not the element of creating competition between the advisers as to the amount of good they can do in an area in a given year.
That element does not exist. There is never any suggestion of a target to be achieved in a particular area. The advisers have never yet been given any kind of approximate survey of the conditions of their area and the amount that requires to be done to improve the grass land, to alter conditions, to improve production. There is not an atmosphere of competitive incentive in the advisory world of the Department of Agriculture and that, again, is because the agricultural advisers work to departmental rules under agricultural committees. While that is perfectly all right in its own way, it does not conform to modern and up-to-date conceptions of public relations.
It is my view and the view of many of my colleagues that the time has come to indulge in an act of faith in the farming community and to give them far more personal, immediate, direct and day-to-day interest in the advisory work done by the Department, to give them the responsibility of knowing what the problem is from the Department's point of view and of having a personal interest to a far greater degree in the work of every adviser and particularly in the work of the new institute that is now to be formed for research.
I see no reason why the institute should not be administered by a corporation consisting of farmers and experts and others. I see no reason why the present Minister should not consider separating in the Department the purely advisory services from the policy services and the services in connection with various schemes, why he should not consider giving the agricultural community a far greater immediate power and interest in the work of research and in the work of providing advice.
I think that in every county the farmers' organisations should be given an indication of the target to be achieved, that there should be some sort of survey conducted in every county where the local farmers' organisations would know the complete problem facing the adviser, the number of acres of grass requiring complete re-cultivation, the difficulties encountered in connection with diseases of animals. They should be given an idea of the kind of target that could be achieved, the work that requires to be done, the difficulties to be met, and they should feel that they themselves had an immediate and direct part in administering the work of the adviser. The adviser should be, so to speak, run by them rather than by the Department in the immediate sense. The feeling that the Department was in some way apart from the agricultural community, that it was run under the aegis of the Minister and that it was rather apart from their immediate lives seems to me to be something which it is time we should end.
I believe that if the present farmers' organisations were given the direct responsibility for the research institute, for directing the work of field advisers on special subjects, who would go down from the Department to the local areas, and in, as I have said, the formation of targets to be achieved and the problems to be overcome, it would be the greatest thing that could be done in the last quarter of a century to bring about an increase of production.
I believe that the farming community would do this work effectively. In other countries, for example, where industry is pre-eminent, the industrial organisations do their own propaganda for increasing productivity. In Great Britain there are a dozen organisations all working towards increased productivity. I refuse to believe that there are not enough intelligent farmers in the whole of Ireland to do this work and to take immediate responsibility for the work, to administer the services through a grant aided association of experts with the professors of agricultural colleges and, if necessary, nominees chosen by the Minister in the various fields to help them.
I believe they should take an immediate part in the work and that if they do, the work of the advisers would be enormously speeded up, and the effective work of the advisers would be greater; in every county and in every area the farming community as a whole would have a far better idea of the kind of target that can be achieved; there would be far more co-operation with the advisers, and the advisers themselves would find their work all the easier.
I think also that, due perhaps to the incidence of the civil war, followed by the economic dispute, followed by the Great War and for other reasons, there is a hopeless inadequacy of research stations in this country. I have made a comparison with conditions abroad and it would seem to me we need far more research stations in every area for every type of soil and in particular for the utilisation of grass after tillage. We need far more research in order to give correct information to the farming community on the results of various mixtures of grass, the extent to which the grass will endure in a particular time, the type of grazing that should be effected in connection with any grass land rotation.
There is a vast amount of research to be done and there again it would seem to me that no matter what the expenditure, this expansion is worth while. I see no reason why the kind of research that is being done in Aberystwyth and in a dozen other areas in Great Britain of a most concentrated kind is not just as essential for this country. Even though we have research stations they are not sufficiently extensive. The grass mixture and strains are not sufficiently varied in number and a vast amount of work needs to be done in that regard. I am willing to admit that there has not been the demand for it for the reasons I have outlined, but my own feeling is that it is very essential indeed.
One objection that has been offered to me in connection with this suggestion that the farming community should take a more direct part in the advisory work, is that it would be almost impossible for the Government to separate policy from advice. I refuse to believe that. If there are differences of opinion on what is the best thing to do under given circumstances in a given area the adviser should be entitled to give his advice for both alternatives in respect of any one thing and there should not be any need to have the policy-making activities of the Department interfering with the general advisory service.
There are an enormous number of objectives in farming policy on which we are all agreed in this House. We are even all agreed about the general value of tillage in spite of the distortions on the other side on subjects such as wheat, and so forth. The present Minister, when he is making a formal speech at a committee of agriculture and on any other occasion, repeats the identical words of the previous Minister in regard to the desirability of tillage in various areas, and it is only when the present Minister differs with us about the value of wheat and when it would appear a great many of his followers are not so keen on tillage, we disagree with him.
However, as we have told the House, he has learned the Fianna Fáil policy of encouraging tillage and we have faced a long struggle to achieve that end. As I have said, there is so much that everybody believes in in regard to agricultural policy that it should not be difficult for the advisers to have a general pattern of work which they can follow and on which they could co-operate, as I have said, with the farming community of this country, and the farming community should be, week after week and month after month, interested in the administration which guides the advisers.
Another reason for the kind of research which would seem to me to be needed here is the fact that you can go down and talk with farmers in any area and on certain matters they cannot give the answer because the facts have not been presented to them. You have, for example, the question of the profit that can be made on cattle at various ages, the profit that can be made on cattle of different breeds, and so on. It seems to me we need research of that kind on a greater level than we have at the present time. I see no reason why, if the British, Dutch and Danes need research of that kind, we do not need it. The conditions here are different; climatic and grass conditions are different.
In that connection, I would like to ask the Minister what steps have been taken in connection with the bull conversion factor testing which is now beginning in Great Britain, in connection with which from the point of view of beef, a beef bull's progeny is tested for the conversion factor, the amount of weight put on to a given intake of food. I would like to ask the Minister whether that kind of experimental research is beginning here.
There are countries abroad where an agricultural adviser can go to a farmer in a given area and if the farmer is a dairying farmer, a mixed farmer or a farmer of any kind, the agricultural adviser can tell him the maximum profit being made on farms of similar size, of similar type and with similar soil. He can tell him the maximum profit that is being made in the area without mentioning names, the medium profit and what constitutes a low profit. Sooner or later we will have to get down to work of that kind. In Great Britain, one example where that information can be given, a man can go and look at a farm of 50 acres and find out from the adviser the actual costings, what is the maximum profit of that farm, the medium profit and so forth. We need far more research in regard to costing for farms of different sizes, different soils and different types and that should be one of the extensions of the work of the advisers, providing costings for farmers in regard to these matters.
One of the principal reasons why the output per acre of small farms of the West, according to the Population Commission, has not shown the same advances as in the East is that, as everybody knows, a great many of the measures for increasing production in the case of small farmers require co-operation. There are co-operatives in the creamery areas but co-operation is a thing which it has always been said is not natural to our temperament. I very much doubt if that is fundamentally true. I believe more can be done to stimulate co-operation and I understand that in the 12-point programme of the Government mentioning the needs of increasing agricultural production the word "co-operation" was actually used.
There, again, it is impossible for the Government to act didactically, but I hope that the Minister would consider various methods of stimulating co-operation. He might, for example, consider offering some help at the initiation of a new co-operative outside a creamery area and not related to the creamery business. He might offer some help at the initiation of a co-operative provided certain conditions were observed. He might help in the matter of credit. Every Deputy here says that the small farmer is unable to get credit to increase his production and sooner or later that fact will have to be faced by the Government of the day. If credit is required, the whole question of farming credit must be investigated.
We hear various stories from both sides of the House. We have heard from the Minister himself; he has told us he has no evidence that the farming community as a whole is seeking credit which is not available to them under the present organisation of the State. We hear others say there is a woeful lack of credit among the small farmers and that something should be done about it. There are various ways in which the Minister might give incentives to co-operative organisations, such as offering them special terms in connection with the machinery loans scheme or in connection with schemes for giving grants for farm improvements. This might induce farmers to form co-operatives, farmers who otherwise would feel that the difficulties and risks in connection with the formation of such co-operatives would not be worth while.
I also learn that there are a great number of creameries which for one reason or another are not willing to act as credit organisations. They may have their own good reasons for that. Some creameries advance credit to farmers for machinery or fertilisers and for various improvements, such advances being collectable by subtraction from the milk cheque. There are other creameries whose credit facilities are extremely limited. I think the Minister should investigate how it is that so few of the creameries have yet become what they should be in my view—cooperative banks as well as creameries.
I know that takes organisation. It takes faith. It takes courage. It seems to me to be inevitable in the future and if, on both sides of the House, it is now agreed that the small farming area will fall constantly behind the big farming area unless co-operative methods are used, both in the marketing and in the purchasing of the more essential requirements and in the use of machinery, it seems to me that is a challenge to any Government. We all of us know that challenge is there and we none of us can avoid it.
Both sides have expressed the view that it is impossible to envisage a large-scale increase in production in the western areas without co-operation between the farmers; both sides have expressed the view that that job somehow has to be done or we will continue to see greater progress made in the big farming areas in increasing output and the use of modern scientific methods and less output in the small farming areas. The 12-point programme of the Government clearly states that and makes it a point at issue. But I accept the difficulties in bringing it about.
There are quite a number of branches of Macra na Feirme which have started a system of veterinary insurance. I am not sure whether there are enough veterinary surgeons in the country to take part in any extended scheme of veterinary insurance and I would like to ask the Minister—he has already been asked by both sides of the House —whether he has considered any form of veterinary insurance or any kind of aid that can be given either to co-operative societies or others to initiate veterinary insurance so as to encourage farmers to make use of veterinary surgeons more immediately thereby encouraging the growth of veterinary services on a very large scale.
I have spoken to veterinary surgeons in various parts of the country and I am aware of the fact that, although great progress is being made in the use to which veterinary services are being put, a great deal more still remains to be done. I think in the case of the co-operative society which either provides an adviser for their members or provides veterinary insurance or facilities for the co-operative use of machinery or the purchase of machinery co-operatively, the Minister should consider taking further steps over and above those which have already been taken to encourage such societies either by way of some kind of initial grant or some sort of premium upon the facilities that are available from the Department generally in relation to such societies.
It is obvious that the task of increasing the extent of co-operation now will be less difficult than it was before. One has only to look at the number of cattle marketing organisations starting up in the country to realise the change that has taken place and realise the fact that the old fashioned fair is gradually being killed in some areas. The farmers are now coming together to run their own auctions. That is an indication of what can be done and an indication, too, that there is a fermentation of thought on the whole problem. It does not seem impossible to imagine that, if the farmers can come together and run their own auctions, they could equally begin to think about the co-operative use of credit and machinery.
I think the Government will have to give some stimulus to that. There is an obligation on their part to give some stimulus if they possibly can. I have tried to speak as far as I could in a non-political way because it seems to me that a great many of the problems we face are not political but technical. I would remark again that the Minister would do far better to start from scratch at the point he has now reached and not try and take credit for something for which credit is not due to him. He should simply regard the present year as a base line for all future increases in production.
So long as he continues to talk politically in the way he has done, then we shall have to repeat endlessly and continually the tremendous work done by those who are now on this side of the House to stimulate production. We shall have to spend our time contradicting the propaganda of the Government, which would suggest that practically every scheme to assist the farmer was started by them rather than by us. We shall have to contradict the propaganda of the Government side of the House making use of the worst weather year in our history, 1947, for the purpose of trying to prove some enormous increase in production as compared with that year when, in fact, the main problem in regard to productivity is still there.
When production increases by a very small amount exports rise and there has been a very heartening increase in exports both in our time in office and in the present Government's. But, of course, the real problem can be concealed by the fact that the Irish people themselves are very big consumers of their own foodstuffs. An immediate increase in exports, which is most valuable and helpful, will take place the moment there is a slight increase in production; but that still leaves the main problem untouched and I would, in conclusion, ask the Minister to do the utmost he can to give farming organisations, Macra na Feirme and the National Farmers' Organisation, a more direct interest in the work of the advisers and in the part that is played by the research organisations, particularly in relation to the new institute, the conception of which is now, I understand, under consideration by the Minister.