Golden Kiwi Funds For Lincoln

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30610, 28 November 1964, Page 9

Golden Kiwi Funds For Lincoln

Nineteen thousand pounds is being made available from Golden Kiwi funds for research at Lincoln College. Professor T. W. Walker, professor of soil science, said this week that £15,000 was being made available to his department to buy expensive apparatus such as an X-ray diffractometer plus a spectrographic attachment costing about £lO,OOO. Together these could be used for analysis of the minerals in soils, in particular the ciay minerals, and also the analysis of minerals in plants. The grant was really to help his department with numerous soil and plant analyses that were accumulating in their research programme. The grant also provided for apparatus for differential thermal analysis. This was for assessing the type of minerals, particularly clay minerals, in soils. Another piece of equipment was an atomic absorption apparatus. This was for the analysis of chemicals in plants and soils. Professor Walker said these pieces of equipment were vital to his department in its studies of soil formation on

the West Coast and in other situations in New Zealand. It would help in the analysis of plant and soil materials for trace elements and other elements that it had previously not been possible to estimate very easily. “When we are trying to improve production on a certain soil—say in tussock country—by sampling plants we will be able to get a very much more comprehensive picture of the nutrient status of the soil,’ 1 said Professor Walker.

Dr. T. M. Morrison, senior lecturer in plant science, has received a grant of £4OOO for several purposes Including studies of nitrogen fixation in non-leguminous native plants, namely tutu and matagouri, studies of the nitrogen nutrition of pine trees and in the transfer of minerals from roots to stems. •

Dr. Morrison said the grant would provide for the purchase of a supply of isotopes of which nitrogen would be the main one. The nitrogen he would be using would cost about £lOOO per

litre of gas. It was, however, a very accurate method of measuring nitrogen fixation—about 1000 times as accurate as the ordinary chemical means. It was possible to take very small samples of plant material (for example one nodule) for six hours in an atmosphere of this nitrogen isotope called heavy nitrogen. From this it was possible to determine the amount of fixation that had occurred in this period very accurately. A lot of treatments could thus be imposed in a small space in a short time. The conventional method was in the glasshouse or in the field and occupied several months.

Dr. Morrison said that tutu and matagouri represented the native nitrogen in the soils in New Zealand, hence their extreme importance in pre-agricultural soils.

It was not known whether pine trees were in some way fixers of nitrogen, but it had been shown that they could fix atmospheric nitrogen on I their needles and could also fix atmospheric nitrogen in their roots, both of which had an abundance of microorganisms growing on them. They were checking by accurate means if this was so.