MORE PRODUCTION

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 113, 8 November 1940, Page 9

MORE PRODUCTION

SHORTAGE OF MANURE

IMPORTANT EXPERIMENTS

Full appreciation of. the important work being carried out by the Fields Division, Department of Agriculture, in helping to increase primary production for war purposes was shown by the Wellington Man-power Committee yesterday, when application was made by the Department for postponement of Territorial training by a field crop experimentalist.

Mr. C. H. Schwass, assistant to the director of the Fields Division, said that the man's work had a direct relationship to the war effort. There was a shortage of about 30,000 tons of superphosphate due to increased production, and very important experiments were now in hand to determine whether silico-superphosphate, which was a mixture of superphosphate and serpentine rock, quarried in North Auckland, would do in actual practice what preliminary tests had already indicated. If it did achieve those results, it would supplement the supplies of superphosphate by 25 per cent.

The man on whose behalf the application was made was engaged on those experiments, said Mr. Schwass. To cope with the unprecedented demand for manures and mue the manufacturers were working to capacity, but still could not overtake the shortage, although their output had been stepped up from 8000 tons to 12,000 tons a week.

It was not long since, he went on, that not more than 25 per cent, of the wheat crop of New Zealand was sown with artificial manures. As a result of the, Department's work it could be claimed that today the whole of New Zealand's wheat crop was sown with artificial manures, experimental work having shown that the application of one hundredweight of phosphate manure per acre, sown with the wheat, had the effect of increasing the yield by from four to five bushels per acre. The increase in yield was approximate, ly 7 per cent. Speaking of the Dominion's, potato crop Mr. Schwass said that until recently the crop, of from 20,000 to 23,000 acres, was sown with all sorts of. artificial manures, both straight and in mixtures. As a result of the Department's work, the manure used today' for the potato crop was more or less standardised by the use of a mixture of superphosphate and sulphate, of ammonia, in the propertion of three parts of the former to one part of the latter.

The case was adjourned sine die