SOIL EROSION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 167, 16 July 1936, Page 7

SOIL EROSION.

Mr. Roosevelt Makes 3,000,000Dollar Grant. LONG-RANGE POLICY. WASHINGTON, July 15. President Roosevelt has allocated 3,000,000 dollars to the Works Progress Administration to enable it to continue its programme throughout the United States for curbing the erosion of soil, reafforestation and the control of floods. Grants will be made to 29 States besides the 12 officially designated as drought States. The administrator, Mr. H. L. Hopkins, has issued a statement to the effect that the Works Progress Administration is interested in long-range, not emergency, drought relief.

"We. are confronted with a chronic, or recurrent, tragedy," said Mr. Hopkins. He outlined the proposed relief measures which he said included 50 dams in South Dakota, an artificial lake 20 miles long in Minnesota and small dams, reservoirs and wells in Wyoming. Yesterday for the first time in any recent drought the Government moved sheep from North Dakota. A message from Chicago states that washouts in the north-west and reports of a cool wave descending from Hudson Bay marked the imminent end yesterday of two weeks of torrid heat which caused nearly 2000 deaths and damage to crops totalling 1,000,000,000 dollars. The effect was felt immediately in the grain pits, all cereals moving lower, led by maize. The down turn in wheat was retarded, however, on reports from Winnipeg that the Canadian crop is in a desperate condition. At Lanark, Montana, a cloudburst washed out 900 feet of railway track. At Climax and Kokomo, Colorado, four inches of snow blocked the roads.