FARM PROPOSAL

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32274, 17 April 1970, Page 6

FARM PROPOSAL

A suggestion that an institution such as Lincoln College should conduct an irrigation farm to establish patterns for farmers to follow was made by Mr A. W. Hurst, of Ikawai, South Canterbury, who has had 30 years of irrigation farming experience, when he made submissions to the irrigation committee of the Water Allocation Council which visited Canterbury last week. Mr Hurst said that the college had already done this on light land' under dry land farming at Ashley Dene and also had a hillcountry property in North Canterbury. Some of the major lending institutions, he was sure, would make money available for this work, as they would have a vital interest' in any future irrigation schemes. Mr Hurst said that over the years irrigation had been the Cinderella of farming and it had only been since the development of automatic irrigation by the staff of the Winchmore irrigation research station and new methods of land levelling that it had progressed and attracted the attention of large numbers of farmers. While not wishing to decry the work done at Winchmore, Mr Hurst said that there was a sad lack of research knowledge and of trained men to do this work.

One area where research was needed, he said, was the study of the efficient use of extra pasture growth produced by irrigation. While a lot of valuable work had been done on this on small scale areas, further problems arose on larger farms which were not apparent on trial areas because of the sheer weight of numbers of stock involved—3ooo, 4000 or 5000 ;shpep on comparatively small areas created problems of their own and these were better solved by some institution before they arose on the farmer’s land. In submissions on behalf Mid-Canterbury Federated Farmers, the provincial president, Mr JR. Cocks, said that the MidCanterbury Agricultural Production Committee and the Ashburton-Hinds Irrigation Association had both made representations to the director of the Research Division of the Department of Agriculture asking for the establishment of a substation of Winchmore irrigation research station or an experimental husbandry farm on a cropping soil to facilitate the study of all aspects of both spray and surface methods of irrigation. “We have reached the stage in Mid-Canterbury,” said Mr Cocks, “where many irrigators, particularly spray irrigators, are ahead of the research worker and are looking for answers to management questions that noone can provide, particularly in relation to optimum times of application on crops, fertiliser usage, including timing of nitrogen applications in conjunction with irrigation, and many other maters.”