Fertiliser a ‘good investment’

Press, 15 July 1987, Page 12

Fertiliser a ‘good investment’

PA Wellington Fertiliser is again becoming a good investment for farmers, says the Under-Secretary for Agriculture, Mr David Butcher.

The best use of any surplus funds for many farmers was reducing overdrafts or hard core debt, Mr Butcher told the annual conference of the Groundspread Fertilisers Association in Christchurch.

“However, depending on the time since fertiliser was last applied, the balance is now shifting to the need to maintain productivity,” he said. “Fertiliser is again becoming a good investment."

Under the Rural Bank debt restructuring scheme, farmers were required to include a maintenance fertiliser budget. The superphosphate fertiliser industry had suffered because it was subjected to “unsustainable expansion” in the years before the present Government was elected. However, a period of renewal had now begun, based on “a sustainable level of agricultural development,” Mr Butcher said.

"The fertiliser industry is now off the bottom of the trough. It will make a future for itself, without subsidies and the distortions that go with them,” he said.