MARGINAL LAND DEVELOPMENT

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27709, 13 July 1955, Page 14

MARGINAL LAND DEVELOPMENT

“MARVELLOUS JOB” IN NEW ZEALAND CHANGES IN 26 YEARS (New Zealand. Press Association) AUCKLAND, July 12. New Zealand had done a marvellous job in improving her marginal lands and reclaiming her hill country, said Mr H. Gordon Bennett, an English stud breeder, today. Mr Bennett, who is on holiday in the Dominion, farmed in the Bay of Plenty and in the Waikato from 1923 to 1929. In his day, the problem was rabbits, roads, and ragwort, not necessarily in that order—one was as bad as the other, he said. In recent months, however. in a motoring trip from Wellington to North Cape, he had seen exactly two rabbits (one at Ngakura, the other at Clevedon). and no ragwort to speak of. and travelled comfortably on roads that previously he could not have tackled without the aid of a bullock team. Mr Bennett, who was employed by the British Ministry of Agriculture after the'Second World War as a farm appraiser and a specialist in hillcountry reclamation, has been most impressed by New Zealand’s use of aircraft to spread topdressing. “I have got a number of good tips on it,” -he said. Fertiliser, he said, was the key to New Zealand’s success with marginal lands—fertiliser and research into soil deficiencies. But he wondered whether the demand for fertilisers might not outpace the supply, and properties already in production be neglected at the expense of marginal lands. He was disturbed, too, by the presence of facial eczema and the swallowing-up of first-class rural land as a result of urban sprawl.