WEEDS AND PARASITIC PLANTS.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7949, 25 August 1891, Page 3

WEEDS AND PARASITIC PLANTS.

Mr M. Murphy, Secretary of the Canterbury Agricultural and Pastoral Association, read a paper last night in the schoolroom, Tai Tapu, before a meeting of farmers. The paper was entitled " Weeds and parasitic plants in relation to agriculture, and the losses caused by them,' and was of an exhaustive character. It dealt with the advent of weeds and their classification ; with weeds as indicating the character of the soil; Acts, ancient and modern, for the purpose of suppressing weeds : the distribution of weeds, and those peculiar to various parts of the colony. The paper included references to the vegetable parasites of agriculture, such as dodder, ergot,, red rust, black smut, bunt, mildew, and apple seal*. In mentioning the remedies, Mr Murphy said he was in favor more of education than of legislation for the suppression of the weed pest, except in eases of Crown lands, river beds, and waste places. Illustrations were given of experiments made by Sir John Sinclair for the purpose of showing the losses through uncleaned ground. Mr Murphy also quoted the observations of a practical New Zealand expert to the effect that our best wheat lands were being reduced in value from 35 to 50 per cent, by the growth of weeds, especially such as the Califolbian thistle, fat hen and wild turnip, and that farming in the future meant a continual war with weeds. This was not a creditable state of things for a young colony to be drifting into. The heaviest tax the farmer bad now to pay was the self-imposed one of weeds. It was.a progressive land tax with a vengeance. If this tax were only wiped out by the fallow plough and the annual burden shifted into a water rate for irrigation purposes, Canterbury would become what nature intended her to be, one of the moat productive and prosperous places in the southern hemisphere. The remedy was in the proper working of fallow lands and fallow crops.