BLACKBERRY PEST.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18670, 20 April 1926, Page 8

BLACKBERRY PEST.

'A REMEDY SOUGHT. N.Z. QUEST IN AMERICA. (FKOM OUR OWN COEaESrOJfDEKT.) SAX FRANCISCO, March 24 Americans, and particularly California ns, have been greatly interested in the curious mission of Dr. R. J. Tillyard, F.R.S., who has arrived in California from New Zealand in search of an insect to drive the blackberries out of New Zealand. This scientist journeyed to Sacramento, the capital city of California, and there conferred with Dr. G. H. Hecke, the State Director of Agriculture, to whom he stated that blackberries had become a veritable pest in New Zealand, oven worse than snakes ever were in Ireland in the time of St. Patrick! The Dominion scientist averred that he was not toying with an academic question, but was engaged in the solution of a problem involving the life or death of New Zealand agriculture. This, at least, was the information given out in Sacramento by the local Press.

The European blackberry, Dr. Tillyard explained, was spreading so fast on the North and South Islands of New Zealand that farmers were being literally driven from their lands by the encroaching bramble. It was added that the New Zealand Government looked upon control of the blackberry as the. outstanding agricultural' problem confronting it, and the Cawthron Institute of Nelson, New Zealand, had sent Dr. Tillyard the chief of its biological department, abroad in search of an insect enemy of the blackberry with which to combat the menace.

"They say we have only one black-, berry on the West Coast, of the, South Island," declared Dr. Tillyard, "which means there is a practically solid growth of the bush about 200 miles long. Once this menace begins to close in on a stretch of agricultural land, the farmer is lost unless he can maintain a full-time brush-clearing crow to battle tho blackberries. The Government is besieged with appeals for help, and fanners are walking off their land in despairs-driven off by the blackberry." • . . . . . If a suitable insect enemy of the blackberry can be .found, however, there was reason, to believe that the "bug" will have the berry on the run in- a short time, believed the New Zealand scientist, who stated that a similar feat already was being accomplished in Australia in the control of the prickly pear cactus, which had occupied 30,000,000 acres, and was spreading at the rate of a million acres a year before insect enemies capable of combating' it were employed to check the depredations^ "The ! prickly pear overran many agricultural sections, and even towns;" said Dr. Tillyard. "before the tide of battle turned. » Then one insect, the common cochineal' bug, destroyed all of one* species of prickly pear in the short space of one year. It.refused to attack any other species, and' some thirty different insects have been- pro-r pagated, and these, increasing at an incredible rate,, are mopping up the rest of the prickly pears." '