UK Ministery of Agriculture

The effortlessly comic abandons the stress of his city job to work on a farm.

This is a half-reel film telling its audience how to use inedible parts of plants from their garden to make compost. It seems pretty basic stuff, but there were a lot of city boys working in what were called Victory Gardens in the United States. Letting them know how easy it was to make compost for a better truck garden meant a lot of fresh food on the home front.

A bovine John Bull rouses patriotism and some more disturbing emotions whilst protesting the importing of foreign meat. Though the message is basically one of “Buy British” to help farmers suffering in the year after the Wall Street Crash, the comic license of cartooning pushes things to extremes. The scenes of meat carcasses being hung from the neck from lampposts and baying mobs outside foreign butchers offer a disquieting analogue with the concurrent rise of Fascism.