SUPERPHOSPHATE ON FARMS

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26605, 15 December 1951, Page 2

SUPERPHOSPHATE ON FARMS

“ WASTEFUL ” USE DEPLORED

A dairy farmer who was using two hundred-weight of superphosphate an acre each year on his land and was taking 2001 b of butter-fat an acre irom it each year, was leaving about half the available calcium phosphate .n the land, where it was wasted, said the pro-chancellor of the University of New Zealand (Mr L. J. Wild) at the annual diploma day of Canterbury Agricultural College, Lincoln, yesterday. “In a few years we will be using about 1,000,000 tons of superphosphate a year in this country, costing £ 10,000,000,’ he said. “That means that we will be wasting about £5,000,000 worth of superphosphate a year. This is a pretty shocking figure, but it does not seem to cause as big a shock as the suggestion that we should spend even £1,000,000 a year on research, which would lessen or eliminate this waste.” 4 A greater proportion of the national income should be “ploughed back” into the land which had produced it, m the form of improved facilities for country settlers,’said Mr Wild. “Not long ago, I saw a large number of workmen engaged in ‘streamlining’ an already beautifully tar-sealed main road—they were making the angle of a curve a little less sharp. Yet on the same day I was driving my car along a country road, and I had to back right off the road to let a truck pass, loaded with many bales of wool.” A farmer’s attitude to his land should be that it was the chief source of his physical, intellectual, and emotional activities, as well as his living, said Mr Wild. “Financial reward should be the least significant of your returns from the land. You should have no patience with those imitation farmers who live by trafficking in farms, sharpening their wits on the soil. The land belongs, not necessarily to the man who has legal title to it, but to the man who lives with and on it, and who understands it.”

No man was allowed to lay a drain without proper inspections and licence, because the country’s health was affected Mr Wild said. It was much more important, however, that the land should be farmed properly, because it was the life and future welfare, as well as the income, of the nation that was affected.