PRODUCTION OF FERTILISER

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26465, 5 July 1951, Page 8

PRODUCTION OF FERTILISER

DEEP COVE SCHEME RECALLED GOVERNMENT ACTION IN 1936 CRITICISED (New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, July 4. The impending fertiliser shortage in New Zealand drew attention to the cost New Zealand was paying for an action of the “Labour-Socialist Government” in 1936, said Mr A. Leigh Hunt, of Wellington, in a statement yesterday. That action was the cancellation of the licence of New Zealand Sounds Hydro-electric Concessions, Ltd., and the preventing of the company from carrying out its plan for harnessing the water powers of Deep Cove, Doubtful Sound. Mr Hunt said that the country was now being forced back to proceed with such a scheme at present nigh production costs.

Because the survey for the Deep Cove scheme was complete, the idea proved, and plans prepared, construction could begin immediately, but even so the penalty remained of at least four years’ delay before the production stage was reached. “This is the cost, and it may prove a heavy one, of allowing a Socialistic Government to inflict a dog-in-the-manger policy on the establishment of an industry which far-seeing men realised was vital to the country’s development,” Mr Hunt said.

Chief among the products the company planned to produce from the cheap water power was nitric acid, the raw materials of which cost nothing, being air and water. Nitric acid was now urgently needed for fertiliser production. Sulphur was needed in the form of sulphuric acid to make phosphate rock into the quicker-acting superphosphate necessary to keep pace with modern methods of agriculture, Mr Hunt said. However, if nitric acid, instead of sulphuric acid, were used on the phosphate rock a still better fertiliser resulted. That fertiliser was not used throughout the Dominion because of its high price when imported from abroad.

Mr Hunt referred to statements the Minister of Agriculture (Mr K. J. Holyoake) made last week to the National Dairy Federation. Last year, the Minister nad said, 74,000 tons of sulphur was used for the production of superphosphate. This year the manufacturers set out to use 87,000 tons, but the. supply would be only 66.000 tons, arid the Dominion could not be sure of getting even this amount n future years. Mr Holyoake had also .aid that because exhaustion of world mlphur supplies was in sight the Doninion would probably have to spend millions of pounds in building up new fertiliser production.