With 22,000 members employed in food production the 'Women's Land Army' is rendering valuable service to the nation. More recruits are now coming forward each week, and among them are young women of excellent type who are leaving good posts to enter one of the national services. Not all those who offer themselves are enrolled, and the interviewers should by now know the type of girl who is likely to settle in farm work and prove really useful in the food production campaign. There have been some misfits, but the proportion is not high.
An impression persists among farmers that it is not easy to get a land girl. This is not so today. It is true enough that the farmer who rings up the county office of the Women's Land Army in the morning will not find a trained milker at his door in the afternoon, unless he is exceptionally lucky. But it is certain that if he can provide facilities for training and decent living accommodation he can get within a fortnight a recruit who, unless he is very unlucky, will be keen to learn and make herself proficient in the shortest time.
This is not the season of the year when most farmers are wanting extra help. The rush of work comes in the spring, but the farmer who can look ahead and book a land girl, or several land girls, to arrive by March 1 or April 1 will not be disappointed by delays when he wants them. Advance booking suits the girls too, as many of them are in jobs and they must give notice to their present employers.
One of the most successful developments this winter is the employment of women in corn threshing. Kent and several other counties have organized teams of women to go round farms with threshing sets. It is work that women can do well, and their help in making up threshing gangs is proving very useful in districts where there is little labour that can be spared for the everyday work of the farm. The small dairy farmer and his men are tied to milking morning and evening, and unless extra help can be got for threshing the working day is too short for full output.
As well as those working on farms there are some members of the Women's Land Army engaged on food production in market gardens and private gardens. Rightly, it has been laid down that members shall be put to work only in private gardens where food production is the major consideration.
But it is quite in order for owners of gardens which are devoted mainly to food production to apply to the county office of the Women's Land Army for a land girl if their men gardeners are being called up for military service. In most counties several of the large gardens where there is an experienced head gardener now take recruits for a month's training, and if they then are sent where the owner is able to give a little supervision, the girls soon settle into the job.
