HOPEFUL SIGNS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 26 August 1927, Page 10

HOPEFUL SIGNS.

TREATING FARM LANDS. THE DEPARTMENT’S CAMPAIGN. The campaign of the Department of Agriculture against the slipping back of pasture lands in the Dominion has already been fruitful, says Mr C. Cockayne, director of the Fields Division. Air. Cockayne declares that the response of the better class of lands to phosphatic top-dressing augurs well for the Department ’s efforts. Fertilisers have been first employed in the attempt to arrest the deterioration and the first difficulty of the Department has been to determine on just what classes of country quite heavy expenditure on top-dressing will be profitable. New Zealand’s experience in land deterioration has been unique, inasmuch as the type of forest land that we have been grassing lias not been sown with grass in any other temperate region in the world. Without data from abroad the Department took up the problem and the progress made has been satisfactory.

‘‘The problem became acute as soon as each individual holding possessed no further bush to burn,” said, Mr. Cockayne to-day. ‘‘As long as each farm held bush country the farmer could obtain more acreage and the equivalent of top-dressed grass by burning it. When the whole farm was in grass the older portions began to go back, there was no fresh young grass and the farm was turned from wet stock country to dry stock country and the position became bad because it was imperative that the farms should be continued on a wet basis. Bush country which was fanned would often run three sheep to the acre and a small holding of 300 acres might be a very nice thing in these conditions, but was very different when it was running about threequarters of a, sheep to the acre.” The method adopted in the campaign, stated the Fields Division Director, was to encourage the farmer to treat liis best land first. With the encouraging results which have been seen so far this treatment, has spread ard the Department’s policy is gradually to extend the treatment to the remainder of the farm and at the same time to get the farmer to increase the number of stock on the rest of the land to keep down second growth. “It, is a long business,” said Air. Cockayne, “but there are very hopeful signs indeed.”