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HomeMy WebLinkAboutZurich Herald, 1956-05-03, Page 3li i±. • T11L FMM FRONT Jokausseil, When Will Barrie of Galt, out. went to Sweden as manager of the 1955 Canadian plowing team, he took a good look around. What he saw impressed him, Here's his report on their farms, forests, diets, way of life, and their beautiful women, as report- ed. in The Imperial Oil Review. * * * I suppose every nation be- lieves - or likes to believe - that its women are the most beautiful on earth. Had anybody asked me a year ago, I would have said, quite honestly, that I thought Canada had the best - looking women. But I'm going right out on a limb and say that the most at- tractive women I've ever seen, as a national group, are not Canadians, but Swedish girls. It's a conclusion I came to after _spending two weeks in Sweden last fall. Any friends reading this will probably be wondering, "What's this got to do with the price of wheat?" They know I'm a far- mer, not a playboy, and that. T went to Sweden last October,•not as a ,movie talent scout, but as manager of the 1955 Canadian plowing team. (Our boys, by the way, did very well in the com- petition for the Esso Golden Plow, at the World Plowing Match. Ivan •McLaughlin of Stouffville, Ont., came second and Joe Tran of Claremont, Ont., was fourth, out of 24 plowmen from 12 countries.) And our •friends on the Canadian Council of • Plowing Associations, which sent us overseas, and at Imper- ial Oil, which provided our pas- sage, understood that the tour we made of- Sweden after the match was to enlighten us about Swedish farming . methods - not about Swedish beauties. * * Well, we did concentrate on farming - believe me! •-- and -the only reason I bring up this question of feminine loveliness is that it helps me explain my most vivid impression of Swedish farming. This impression became firm in my mind (after a con- versation with some local resi- dents) when we visiting plowmen and managers stopped not far from the home of a girl named Hillevi Rombin. Her name may not mean much to you, but per- haps it will when I add that she is Miss Universe of 1955. We didn't see her ourselves, for she was in the United States at the time; but.we did meet some peo- GROWRROARRR - This gent is convincing, whether it's a com- ment on politics, baseball or somebody's wedding. Leo Feline, obove, demonstrates the form that brought him the Debate Championship at the Iondon bZoo. Against that armored trap, who cah argue? ple who knew her well. One of them remarked that Miss Rom - bin was a charming and whole- some girl from a very fine fam- ily. Then he said something that I thought was far more remark- able. "She's very pretty," he said, "but we never considered her any better -looking than the rest of the girls around here." This remark was not intend- ed to disparage Miss Rombin in any way; it was a simple and honest observation. I feel• sure he would have said the same. thing about such famous Swed- ish beauties as Garbo, Bergman and Anita Ekberg. Right then I began to realize that the Swedes make a regular habit of achieving near -perfection and then taking it for granted. Fortunately I don't have to rely on anything as intangible as feminine charm to prove this over-all impression of mine. The best proof was what I saw of Swedish farming methods. And what is trueof the farm folk is probably true of the majority of the population for about one- quarter 91 Sweden's 7,,200,000 citizens live on farms. k * The ability to achieve near - perfection is evident everywhere. You can see it in the forests which cover well over a third of most farms. Here in Canada we have talked for years about tree conservation but are just getting around to converting our words into actions. In Sweden, f. ores t conservation practices, such as selective cutting and methodical replanting, were started at least a century ago and are now standard procedure in every forest, whether owned - by wned-by. a farmer, a lumber company, - or the government. No Swedish farmer, I was, told, would dream. of cutting a, tree without con- sulting a government forester be forehand. The result is that the Swedes are decades ahead of us in reforestation. Both Canada and Sweden cut a lot of timber every year, but our forests are dwind- ling while theirs are increasing in size. Furthermore, the Swed- ish farmer usually gets far more rain than he wants, so he does not have the incentive we do to plant trees for water conserva- tion. * To be perfectly fair, I must mention that their forest floors are covered with a natural moss that undoubtedly helps to pre- vent fires, so they don't suffer the timber losses we do each summer. But that's all the more reason why we should be doing more to conserve what we can. I was even more amazed when I saw what happens when the same, philosophy is applied to crop farming. Here• in Ontario, a man who gets 60 bushels of wheat to the acre is a really good farmer. The average wheat ,yield in my own Waterloo county, ac- cording to the last figures I saw, was 35.1 bushels to the acre. In Sweden I met farmers who pro- duce as much as 70 bushels of wheat to the acre, and the last published figures show that Swe- den's wheat production, per acre, is about 60 per cent higher than Canada's. (With yields like this, the only reason their• total pro- ductivity is not as high as ours that the country is so small; for every acre they have been able to cultivate, we have 38 acres of farm Land or potential farm land.) What's the secret? 1 knew there must be one, because nobody CROSSWORD PUZZLE I. Tibetan Monk . Wing '1. Shortening 12. 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Spread z 3 4 12 IS 5 6 7 8 •13 18 e. • 21 z2 26 27 'as 30 32 17 zo 38 9 10 I I z9\`;• y,�3 35 33 34 39 45 49 54 57 10 q1 4 46 47 18 50 . 5Z Ails*etr 58 Is Where .on thio page. FOR WATCHING DRY PROGRAMS? -- Camel saddles have sup- plied a welcome oasis in a financial desert for Razouk Malik, 26, above, Lebanese student at ' Southern Illinois University. Shipped here from dollar -short Lebanon by his father as a means of supplying the boy with funds, the sheepskin -covered hard- wood saddles are finding .0 reqdy market for use as TV viewing stools. gets crops like that year after year,. just by luck or accident. I found the Swedish farmer uses tremendous quantities of fertil- ier, For a grain. crop on which we would use perhaps 200 or 300 pounds of fertilizer per acre, the Swedish farmer will use up to 2,000 pounds - 1,500 in the fall and. another S00 in the spring. • I need hardly add that the extra yield more than covers the cost • of..the extra fertilizer.' I don't know of a farm in Can- ada with land' that could utilize anything near 2,000 pounds of fertilizer per acre• Does that mean that the 'Swedish farmer happens to be lucky? Not at all. The reason he can use such quan- tities of fertilizer is that he and his forefathers have been 'condi 'tioning. their lands to it for gen- erations.' There's. nothing we Canadian; farmers could do that would en- able us to- get our lands into this condition this year, next year ',or even five years from' now, But unless we • make sure now .,that we are planting the right things in the right soil, are ro- tating our crops properly and are doing everything else possible to improve our soil conditions, even our great - grandchildren won't be able 'to do as well as Swedish farmers are doing now. Another secret of the agricul- tural success in Sweden is their system of testing stations, where samples of soil and produce are analyzed. I doubt if there's a•far- mer anywhere in Canada who has to be sold on the advantages of scientific testing, but here again I found the Swedes have, set us a good example. Our test- ing stations are just as good as theirs but they have a lot more of them - about 200 in a country half the size of Ontario. Thus the great majority of farmers find it easy to get scientific guidance in every phase of their work. My own farm happens to be within easy driving distance of the Ontario Agricultural Col- lege at Guelph, Ont., and I use its testing services quite often. But I know there are some far- mers in Canada who haven't a testing ' station within 200 miles, and no doubt their farming suf- fers as a result. * You could argue that there's 11 t t l e point in increasing our yields in some crops, such as wheat, if we can't sell what we are already producing. But con- servation projects take a long time - sometimes a lifetime or longer - before they begin to pay off. I can't see any justifica- tion for robbing our descendants of good lands just because • we have marketing problems. The Swedish farmer is in the happy position of being able to sell, quite readily, almost every- thing he can produce. Part of this is due to luck; but planning has something to do with it too, The luck lies in the fact that the population of Sweden is just about right in proportion to the amount of food that can be pro- duced on the land, and since the country is physically small compared to Canada, the Swedes. haven't . costly transportation problems The planning that helps him takes the form of co- operatives. I'm certainly not sold on all forms of co-ops. In fact, I'm convinced that co-op stores, as we saw them in Britain, are not in the best interests of the general public, for what is every- body's business soon becomes nobody's business, and everybody suffers, especially the customer. The Swedish co-ops were not stores, but co-ops run by pro- ducers and it was an eye-opener to see and hear how the Swedish farmer uses them to market his goods and maintain fair prices. Co-ops also come into the pic- ture often ,at the processing stage, too, with the farmer using co -operatively -owned plants that would be too expensive for him to own alone. That's the case `sometimes, for example, with the big drying plants where they must reduce the moisture con- tent of their grains before they can be stored safely. I wish I could say at this' point that our post-war trend toward mechanization has put us far ahead of '' the Swedish farmers in this respect; but it just isn't so. Granted, they have fewer pieces of equipment per farm, but their farms are small, even by Ontario standards, with an average of 80 acres, and 50 of these in forest. From what I saw, I'd say they were just as 'well mechanized as ours. However, several Swedes told me they thought Canada produced 'the best combines in the world, and I noticed them using many of the makes of tractors that are so familiar to us. EMPLOYMENT PROBLEM A street - corner Salvation Army meeting had attracted a small group of spectators, and after the playing of a few hymns, the captain approached a young. hepcat in the ,audience. She placed her hand on his shoulder and •asked : "Wouldn't you like to work for the Lord?" Smiling :bashfully, the hepcat replied : "No thanks; I already got, a job." TOP DOG -Lassie has proved to be on of TV's leading actors. The canine star poses in New York after having won a George Foster Peabody award for dis- tinguished achievement on tele- vision during 1955. The show was picked cis best youth and children's program. SPELLING BEE The fact that Shoeless •Joe Jackson couldn't read or white became common knowledge very quickly. One clay when the White Sox were playing the In- dians, a Cleveland rooter got "on" Shoeless Joe, Every time Jackson came to bat, the "jockey" would yell, "Hey, Shoe- less Joe, how do you spoil illi- terate?" In the 'top of the ninth, Jack- son came up with the score tied and a runner on first. Again the nuisance screamed;' "Hey, Shoeless Joe, how do you spell illiterate?" Jackson promptly belted one off the right -center fence for a triple, bringing in the tie - breaking tally. Standing on third base, he turned toward his tormentor and shouted, "Hey, big mouth, how do you spell triple?• GI�L1N 4, //K., ill B w,,y a, / Brand New - Even people who have just moved into a brand new house can have a good garde., and have it this season too. Even those who rent and znove every few years can also have an ex- cellent showing. In these cases, of course, we rely on annual flowers rather than perennials which must get established. And, it is amazing what can be done with annuals exclusively. We can get vines that will cover a porch in a matter of weeks, things like scarlet runner beans, the modern and vastly improved morning glories. Or we can use window boxes filled with trail- ing nasturtiums, and semi -trail- ing petunias, marigolds and zinnias. • For big screens, to act as hedges there are all ,sorts of rapid growing bushy annuals like cosmos, African marigolds, spider plants, larkspur, hibiscus, malope and others that are listed in any Canadian seed catalogue. These quick growers reach two to four feet and will take the place of shrubbery and give privacy as well as abundance of bloom. As for the regular beds, there are hundreds' of annuals from which to choose. Where we have just moved in we can combine special annuals with the permanent perennials which will eventually take their place. In amongst the tiny new shrubs, climbers, and trees, we plant liberally with big annuals and we continue to do this, for the first few years until the permanent stuff has got estab- lished and requires the full room. Can't Buy This Quality We all know the old argu- ment about it being cheaper to buy vegetables than for the ur- ban man to grow them. That is all very well, but it overlooks an important point. No matter how handy the store and how fast :the transportation, it just isn't possible to buy the sort of freshness that only comes with vegetables grown in one's own garden. A little • plot where we have a few feet of lettuce, onions, radish, carrots and per- haps a raw of beans, tomatoes, or corn, will repay itself many times over just in freshness alone. Not a great deal of room will be necessary. To make it go further there are various ways of growing two crops, or prac- tically so, on the same piece of land. Of course in this intensive sort of vegetable gardening, ex- tra fertilizer is essential and the soil must be well worked and rich. In double cropping, we alternate rows of an early kind with a later one, for in- stance radish and carrots, or lettuce and beans, or peas and corn. We also have less space than normal between the rows, if necessary no more than 12 or 15 inches. The early stuff, of course, comes on quickly and is used up before the later ma- turing vegetables require full room. Another practice is to follow the harvesting of the first vegetables like the peas, lettuce, spinach, radish, early onions, etc., with another sowing of the same or something else that will be ready say in August or Sep- tember. Then there are certain crops like squash, pumpkins, that we can plant in the outside rows and we can have staked tomatoes along the end of any vegetable row and cucumbers along the fence. Don't Bury Them Almost every one is inclined to plant far too deeply. With tiny seed such as that of lettuce, carrots, cosmos, zinnias, poppies, and alyssum, which are not much larger than the head of a pin or shingle nail, it is not necessary to cover at all. We sow these in the finest soil and merely press in. Then, if pos- sible, we keep the soil dampen- ed until germination starts. With DAY SUIOUL LESSON lt. Barclay Warren, B.A. R.D. TIte Church Reaches Out Acts 8:4.8, 14-11, 26-28, 34-55 Memory Selection; By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one for another. John 13:55. The early church was quick to heed the command given them by Jesus: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gos- pel to every creature." Mark 16:15. The whole church re- sponded. Today's lesson records the response of one of the seven men chosen to flare for the daily ministration for the needy., He was full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. He went over to the city of Samaria and preach- ed Christ to them. They gave heed to his words and marvel- led at the. miracles wrought at his hand. Unclean spirits crying with loud voice were cast out and the siek were healed. "There was great joy in that city." This awakening was followed by a visit from the apostles Peter and John. They prayed for the people that they might receive the Holy Ghost. Be- lieving on Jesus was followed by the receiving of the gift of the Holy Ghost. We see a simi- lar pattern in regard to the church at Ephesus. Acts 19:5,6.. A study' of the biography of many Christians indicate that believing. on Jesus Christ for the forgiveness.' of sins is fre- quently followed by the receiv- ing of the Holy Ghost purify- ing the heart. (Acts 15:9) and giving them power to witness, Lawson in his book, "Deeper Experiences of Famous Christi- ans" shows this in detail in the lives of many as Moody, Earle, Finney, Wesley, etc. Different terms are used to describe this experience. It is called The Baptism of the Holy Ghost, The Spirit Filled Life, The Conse- crated Life, The Higher Life, The Deeper Life, Perfect Love, Entire Sanctification, etc. But the main point is that the be- liever grasps the privilege of going deeper with God and be- coming more effective in His Kingdom. Philip's next assignment look- ed like a demotion. He was sent to the desert. But it was an important mission. He was sent to minister to an Ethopian in his chariot. As Philip ex- plained to him the passage about Jesus in the prophecy of Isaiah, the man believed and was baptized. Philip settled at Caesarea. He had four daugh- ters who prophesied. (Acts 21:9) There were many others in the early church who gave them- selves and their families to God„ 4.111 larger seeds such as nastur- tiums, peas, beans and corn, one should cover lightly, say a quarter to half inch. With bulbs or corms of gladiolus, dahlias, or potatoes, one plants four to eight inches deep. So Young, Too A four-year-old got sunburn- ed, and it had reached the peel- ing -off stage. As he was wash- ing up for dinner, his mother heard him mutter, "Only four years old and wearing out al- ready!" Upsidedown to Prevent Peeking 000©:©©© ©OME ©F]®©; ©©© 0©C J UMW 0000EMEC MM MOOD WM MOO 0MEM 012TIMBUE: ©g 00000 O00' 021100 MOUE ©®00©O�W OMR .; 0E00 OEW MEM EOM k1kJC1 MOW , DOWN YOU GO 7- Talk about chuckholes, man, they've go* whoppers down here in New Mexico. ira Straque found one of 'em the hard way. Not even Texas has chuckholes this sizte. Ira's car whent through the pavement on U.S. 66 in downtowns Albuquerque. Maybe he was looking for an underground park - 'mg lot -they're the fad. M least the car wasn't damaged much.