FARMER SUPPORT FOR RESEARCH

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31143, 20 August 1966, Page 9

FARMER SUPPORT FOR RESEARCH

The thing that had possibly impressed him more than anything else in the course of a four weeks’ visit to Australia was the very considerable amount of direct financial support given to agricultural research by producers or farmers, the director of the Entomology Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Dr. J. M. Hoy, said this week. While he was aware that organisations like the Wool Board in New Zealand supported research, Dr. Hoy said that by comparison little direct financial support was given to research in New Zealand by farmers. The flexibility of this support in Australia, he said enabled a better orientation to be achieved towards research of direct concern to farmers. It was particularly valuable in facilitating the purchase of equipment and employment of staff. He believed that at least a third of the entomological research carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation was financed in this way. An example of a project being financed in this way was one in which an investigation was to be made of the effect of variations in climate on grass grubs and to this end a series of about 20 automatic recording stations were being set up in an area about 200 miles long by about 20 miles wide and these stations would transmit full climatic information by radio to be recorded on punched tapes in a form ready for processing by computer. Questioned about research in Australia into the grass grub problem and the Aus-

tralian equivalent of the porina, Dr. Hoy said that generally Australia was not particularly advanced in the use of insecticides on pasture land, due to the relatively low fertility of a lot of their pasture land and the masking effect that this had on the damage of grass grubs and other pests. Accordingly not much had been done in the field of granular and pelleted insecticides, but Australian workers were very interested in what was being done in New Zealand and they were keen to send people to work with New Zealand scientists. In this direction Australians could learn more from New Zealand than New Zealand could learn from Australia, and Dr. Hoy said he hoped that it would be possible for Australian scientists to come here. On the other hand in the study of the biology and ecology of grass grubs Australia was ahead of New Zealand. The trouble in New Zealand was to obtain suitable trained staff to do this work.

Australia, he said, had real' ised that with the fairly rapid development of her grassland farming she could well run into the same sort of problems that New Zealand had been experiencing for the last 40 or 50 years. Thus she was concentrating a considerable amount of work on preliminary investigations into the habits and biology of these pests that would be valuable when, and if, this situation developed.

Thus at Armidale in New South Wales a special pasture research station had been established to do entomological and agronomic research on exclusively grass grub problems. The type of work they were doing involved the assessment of the amount of direct damage done by grass grubs in loss of pasture production and work on the life history of the

grass grub and its relationships with parasites and predators. It had been found in Australia that where pasture lands were cleared of eucalyptus trees grass grub damage was more severe, which was attributable to the removal of feed for parasites of the grass grub. In this context Dr. Hoy recalled that in seeking to establish thynnid wasps from South America in New Zealand as a parasite of the grass grub, Mr B. B. Given, of his division, had sought to place them initially in an area where there was a supply of nectar, and if they were to be subsequently distributed more widely it. might then be necessary to establish nectar sources in those areas also.