As a practical farmer, elected to this House on the Agricultural Panel, I must first of all admit candidly that I have not had a great deal of experience in the growing of wheat. In the county that I come from, the acreage of land held by each owner is small and the fields are not big enough for the growing of wheat to make it a profitable or useful sideline to farming. Therefore, when a person in my position rises to speak in this House he cannot speak altogether for the constituency which he comes from. Each and every one of us, in order to get elected to this House, has to do a country-wide canvass when looking for preference votes. In my canvass tour I met a great many farmers who have grown wheat and are anxious to grow it; farmers to whom the growing of wheat is as essential in their type of agricultural economy as the growing of patatoes, barley and oats is to farmers west of the Shannon.
There can be no doubt whatever but that all our farmers are disappointed and are very much concerned at the reduction in the price of wheat. If for example, an industrialist in this country were told overnight that there would be a 15 per cent. reduction in the price of the finished article that he was producing, he certainly would protest in no uncertain manner against it. Therefore, it is no wonder that our farmers, seeing that the price of wheat is being reduced by something like 15 per cent., are angry with the present Minister for Agriculture. They are angry with him because he has had to take on himself the very ugly task of reducing the price of wheat this season. To make matters even worse, for both the Minister and the farmer we have experienced this year the worst harvest weather in living memory as a result of which hundreds of acres of wheat and of all cereal crops have been lost. Every effort was made to save those crops but it was of no avail.
We find that even in the case of cereal crops that were stacked and thatched and well attended to in the haggards of the smallest farmers and of the wheat grain which had been threshed and secured in the barns, the grain itself is of much inferior quality to what we were used to in days when we had good harvest weather. These, of course, are things over which the Minister has had no control. This other consideration arises that, even if we had been blessed with good harvest weather such as we had over the previous five or six years, we would still be faced with this predicament— it may be a good one or a bad one— that we would have more wheat on our hands than would be necessary for the country's needs. In that situation there would be only one thing for us to do and that was to try and find an export market for it. Assuming that we could, we would then find ourselves in competition with the great wheat-growing countries such as Canada, the United States, Australia and perhaps the Ukraine, where wheat can be grown under the best weather conditions. Consequently their wheat is of superior quality to what we can produce here.
Because of the high and very encouraging price given to our farmers for wheat, we would have had an exportable surplus of wheat. On the other hand, we find that other cereal crops, as essential in their own way as wheat, have been entirely neglected. We have found that the acreage under oats and barley has been considerably reduced for the reason to put it bluntly that there was more money, easier money and readier money in wheat. In consequence of all that, the Government and the Minister for Agriculture were faced with a very difficult and I would say a nasty problem. I know, of course, that to reduce the price of any agricultural commodity is not a thing which the Minister would be proud of. He would not care to set about reducing the price of any agricultural product essential for the country's economy. Nevertheless, he has to take into consideration the broad economy which affects the entire agricultural population, and, having examined it in that light, he must take some steps to strike an even balance as far as cereal crops and tillage generally are concerned.
We then find ourselves in a position which is unfortunate for the honest, decent, hardworking and industrious farmer who has always grown wheat. He did so when the price of wheat was 30/- a barrel, 50/- or 60/- and when it was 82/6. We find people of that kind being penalised side by side with the gentlemen and the limited companies that came into this country when they saw an easy thing in wheat growing; when they saw the ready money that was in it, even though they did not know anything about wheat growing and perhaps did not even see it being put into the soil or taken out of it. Yet, they came along and were able to secure very substantial profits from every acre of wheat which they grew.
The pity is, of course, that both this type of individual, the speculator, and the honest, industrious mixed farmer had each to take the rap and bear the burden alike, because wheat growing can be a blessing and can be a curse in any country. Those of us who are farmers, even though we only grow a limited amount of wheat which we use ourselves, know that wheat is by far the severest of the cereal crops on the land. Personally, I would rather grow three crops of oats in succession on my land or two crops of barley since they would take less out of the land than one crop of wheat. Cereal crops should not be allowed to be grown unless in proper crop rotation with a root crop in between every second year or at least every two years. If a wheat crop is put in, even on fair or middling land after a root crop, it will give a reasonably good return provided the weather is good.
In the case of the speculators, however, they will grow one, two, three or maybe four crops of wheat in succession on the same land and soil. A person does not need to be a farmer to realise the condition in which that land will be left when four crops of wheat have been taken out of it in succession. It will be of no value whatever to anyone for a considerable number of years. By putting in between, in proper rotation, grass crops—the Minister has always told us that grass should be treated as a crop just the same as cereals—and other crops, we know the growing of wheat can help to break up old pastures and, therefore, bring about the production of a better type of grass as well as everything else.
The speculator farmer has no interest whatever in leaving anything after him other than the ashes of the soil he was tilling. His one object is to get as much as possible out of the wheat crop while the price is high, and clear out after filling his pockets with his gains at the expense of the land, leaving it in poverty behind him. For that type of individual there should be no consideration whatever. Unfortunately, there is no way we can deal with him. These speculator farmers are chiefly people who have rented land from aliens, who purchased land here over the years, and who have never seen it. They bought it only as an investment and they are willing to let it out at the very handsome figure of £20, £25, £30 or even, I am told, £35 per acre for conacre wheat. In the county I come from nobody could pay £30 an acre for land for any crop and make a profit on it.
If you throw in the amount of labour and the cost of seeding, either of the cereal crops or root crops, when our work and labour is over at the end of the year, if you take out of it an average weekly wage for ourselves we would have nothing whatever left, if we had to pay £20 an acre for conacre land to grow any type of crop. Maybe because of the better type of land in the Midlands and in the grain belts in the south-cast of the country and here around Dublin and Louth, people can make it; but, whether they do so or not, conacre taken on that system is a very bad thing to encourage. For this type of individual there should be no concern.
With the guilty come the innocent. The people who have always grown wheat are penalised now. They do not like a reduction from 82/6 to an average of 70/- a barrel. For them this is a loss—and a loss at a time when everybody else is looking for increased salaries, wages and incomes to meet the increased cost of living. Those who have tilled land generation after generation, who take a pride and delight in breaking up their soil and tilling at and who in many cases during the emergency never needed a Department's inspector inside their fields because they were quite willing to do it themselves, those people who are suffering are the people about whom I am concerned most.
While I have great concern for them, I must say that the life of the farmer is just a political football kicked backward and forward from one political Party to another. Listening to the speeches made from the Opposition Benches and reading the speeches made in the Dáil, I have no doubt whatever that had Fianna Fáil been the Government now there would be a reduction, either big or small, in the price of wheat. They may not go as far as the present Minister, but many of them have admitted that it would be all right to bring about a reduction gradually. Their complaint is that there was too big a reduction made in a single year, after such a disastrous harvest. If Fianna Fáil were the Government and if they brought about a reduction in the price of wheat, I have no doubt whatsoever but the Opposition Party who are now the Government would be moving a motion something similar to the motion that has been moved from these benches, demanding a reason why the farmers' price for wheat was being reduced. Therefore, I do not see any single mark of sincerity in the motion here before us.
We all know that the aim of the Fianna Fáil Party was to produce two-thirds or thereabouts of the wheat needs of this country. We know from the figures what we have got. We know they agreed to an International Wheat Agreement, to import 270,000 tons of wheat. I am and will be in agreement with the importation of a certain amount of wheat. If we try to produce bread from our own wheat, a 100 per cent. finished loaf, we know perfectly well we will be faced with inferior quality bread because, due to our climatic conditions and the heavy rainfall, the wheat we grow here cannot possibly, through no fault of ours, be as good as the wheat which comes from abroad; but a mixture of foreign with our own will give us an excellent article, a perfect article, a superior article even to that produced entirely from imported wheat.
Therefore, I agree entirely with the idea of importing a certain amount each year to mix with our own. As well as that, seed wheat is always better for the change. If there is a new type and a new brand which will give heavier yields per acre, which will bushel better, it is certainly ideal and sensible to import that and get the very best brand of grain for the farmers. How could there be sincerity in a motion when the movers know that 270,000 tons of wheat have to be imported and at the same time demand that the price paid be held next year at the level it is at this year? We would import wheat and export our own, which is of inferior quality; we have no storage facilities to hold over a year's supply. Unfortunately for ourselves, when the wheat was threshed and ready to be delivered to the mills, from the modern machines and the combines, we found that the drying facilities in the mills were taxed to their very capacity.
We had questions raised in the Dáil in regard to people who had to wait so many days and weeks to take their wheat. It could not be dried. It was in sacks thrown off the combines in the fields with the rain pouring down upon it. They could not gather the sacks of wheat and the mills would not take them. We had that type of complaint. It went to prove that the mills in this country were taxed to their very capacity in trying to handle and dry the amount of wheat presented to them during this harvest. What would the position be if this was a normal harvest and the amount of wheat 25 per cent. more than it was? If we had an excellent harvest, with imported wheat we would have been in the middle of a wheat muddle which would have cost this country a pretty penny because we would be subsidising the growing of wheat to sell it in England or elsewhere. In other words, we would be taxing our own people to provide cheap wheat for the people of some outside country to eat.
As a farmer, I know that if you have suitable land wheat is a very easy crop to grow. Wheat will stand up when oats and barley will fall down. Even though efforts have been made by Department of Agriculture scientists, not only in this country, but throughout the world, they have failed so far to find any variety of straw in oats or barley which would stand up and resist the weather in the same way as wheat does. In a standing crop modern machinery can go to work. I have heard the combine being abused very much. That is all very fine but how would people manage to gather the harvest, even a fairly small harvest, were it not for the use of some mechanised implement?
After the reaping hook came the scythe. After the scythe came the mowing machine with its reaping attachments. After the mowing machine with its reaping attachments came the reaper and binder and after that came the combine harvester. A combine harvester can be very useful. I do not know what other people think but as a farmer, I know that the young men of to-day do not want to bend their backs in a harvest field like they did ten, 15 or 20 years ago. They are perfectly right because the day when heavy manual toil is taken out of agricultural work will be a boon and a blessing to the farmer and the agricultural labourer. People may say that the introduction of the combine will kill labour on the land. The introduction of a, combine will certainly do away with labour on the land but still you must realise that if farmers do not employ their men entirely for the harvest the people employed as agricultural labourers are generally kept on all the year round. There is no farmer or group of farmers who may have invested in the purchase of a combine who will suddenly dispense with agricultural labourers for the three or four days that a combine would be doing the work and then have to go and look for them afterwards.