FARMING NEWS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 77, 28 February 1938, Page 4

FARMING NEWS.

RURAL RAKINGS. A record fruit season for Hawke’s Bay is anticipated by_ Mr C. G. Wilkinson, rnanager. at Hastings for the Now Zealand Fruitgrowers’ Federation. He said he believed the present pointed t 6 the export exceeding the previous best total by 60,000 cases. It is anticipated that 370,000 cases will bo exported front Hawke’s Bay. The reason why suburban gardeners find the Californian thistle difficult to eradicate is not far to seek, when some of its feats of rooting arc known. A farmer on the outskirts of Christchurch (says the StarSun) has hanging in his barn , a specimen with a root twenty-four feet long. Thdt was the height of the hay stack on the top of which tho seed was dropped by a bird, and tho plant sent its root downwards right through thO Stack to the ground. At a recent meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria, ocnccrn waS expressed by a number of speakers at the spread of blackberry, and it was decided to approach the Federal Government asking that additional money bo granted for further investigations with a view lo ex'tcrminiiHiig the pest. It was stated tluu most, of the land from Melbourne (o A!bury was blackberry riddled and was becoming valueless. Believing that there is a very real danger of a similir tragedy in Canterbury, agricultural experts are devoting a considerable amount of attention to the history of wind erosion in the United States, WhOrC, in recent years, dust storms have swept ill the arable Soil from hundreds of square miles. of country and deposited it elsewhere, burying farms and even villages (states tile Christchurch Star-Sun). Both the denuded areas and thoso where tho dust has fallen have been ruined. Since a great part of Canterbury’s arable soil is loess—fine sand and silt windbprne from the river beds and now consolidated' by humus —a tragedy similar to that of America’s “dust bowi” is foreseen if tlio humus is taken out of it, as it was in America, by excessive cropping. There would then be every possibility, during a dry summer with, strong north-west winds, of a dust storm starting that would strip largo areas of ■ their soil.