FIBRES OF COMMERCE

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 74, 29 March 1932, Page 6

FIBRES OF COMMERCE

Fibre improvement—in wool and in flax —could go a long way towards lifting New Zealand's depression. If scientific development in industrial processes consists mainly of two things—a mastery of the salient f acts and "applied common sense"—then it has to be admitted that never has the scientific outlook been better than it is to-day. Both wool-growing and flax-growing are being subjected to fact-finding investigation all along the line, from soil to market. A few years ago nothing was heard of animal nutrition. The sheep and cattle just grew, and the grass just grew. To-day the character of soils and the I genius of grasses are being studied as never before, and the same can be said of the feeding value of pasture, how to produce and graze it; of breeding and management, and the production of better wool; also of 1 the *better manufacture of wool so as to meet feminine insistence. A heap i of work is being done to extend the use of wool as a textile, and to place among the textiles the fibre of phormium. While phormium does not command the scientific attention oversea that is given to wool, it yet has its oversea as well as its New Zealand investigators, and the attack on the phormium problem, if not so systematic as that on wool, is nevertheless more detailed and better planned than ever before. Though the flax of phormium is vegetable fibre, and its study includes I none of the animal husbandry that is vital to wool, it yet presents numerous problems. Its culture is an almost unknown field—flax cultivation is only beginning, and breeding and selection have Been under detailed investigation for about four years. Thus the plant itself appears to be entering a new era in the matter of leaf quality and diseaseresistance. In the manufacturing region also the very old processes are being re-examined at every point, not only to give better fibre from better plants, but also to develop by-pro-ducts instead of wasting ,the vegetable matter scattered round by the stripper when it assaults the green leaf. Given an equal, will to expansion at the marketing end, the wider utilisation of phorrnium should place it once again high in the list of exports—that is, of the commodities which New Zealand sells abroad in order to buy her imports. These exported articles,are so many strings, at the end of which hangs an importing and borrowing country that can import and borrow only in proportion to the soundness of these vital connections with the outside world. .When other strings were at tension, phorrmum definitely snapped. To renew it means recreating it with a higher breaking strain, and that is the big work which the men of science are attacking. If at the same time they find new sources of phormium wealth, so much the better.