VEGETABLE SCHEME

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 60, 11 March 1944, Page 4

VEGETABLE SCHEME

ALLEGATION OF WASTE

property near WHANGAREI

(By Telegraph.—Parliamentary Reporter.)

WELLINGTON, this day.

Advocating the abandonment of the Government's scheme for the production of vegetables in favour of private enterprise, Mr. Murdoch (Nat. Marsden), in the House of Representatives, told a story of the waste on a vegetable farm near Whangarei. . , Two dairy farms, he said, had been converted into market gardens, and one had an area of between 70 and 80 acres. The Government was paying £5 an acre a year for the property. Mr. Murdoch said, he had been told that tractors and discs were being employed on oine of the farms and he had gone out to the property and found that a field of pumpkins of about five acres was being cleared. Tractors were towing discs, which were destroying the pumpkins, which were nearly ready for harvesting. He had been informed that about four acres of peas and carrots had also been ploughed up, and that three acres of maize, some feet in height, had been let for grazing at £3 an acre. The reason for the destruction, so he was told, was that the Govern ment proposed to hand the farm back to the owner and that, before that was done, it had to be put back into first-class grass. The owner would naturally say that grass had to be sown at a certain time to bring the-land back into pasture.