WEEDS IN RUSSIA

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 11 March 1933, Page 8

WEEDS IN RUSSIA

SOVIET’S FARM POLICY APPEAL TO THE YOUNG LONDON, 24th January. Tlie (Moscow correspondent of the “Observer” sends an illuminating quotation I'iom the “Komsomolskaia Pravda,” the journal of the Young People’s Communist Party. It is an appeal to the young Communist organisations throughout the Soviet Union to start a campaign of fighting tlie weeds that are choking Socialist fields. Their roots are now firm and deep in the ground, their stalks have pushed out and replaced the grain. “The most cruel enemy of socialist harvest, the weed,” says the document, “has entrenched itself on the fields of state and collective farms. Weeds are the scourge of our farms. Savages, possessing monstrous fecundity, they have seized huge stretches of our land. They choke up the seeds, poison food products. They obstruct our planting and harvesting. They make difficult the work of machines, they slow up the tractors. They give shelter to masses of harmful insects and animals. Their spread spells tlie ruin of our harvest. “Yearly on account of weeds we lose a quarter of our harvest. This year, especially, weeds have spread, because the simplest agricultural rules have not been observed in the collective farms, because land lias not been properly ploughed. . . In the North Caucasus on a small area 46 varieties of weeds were discovered. ... On each square meter of planted area there were 152 stalks of wheat and 5b7 stalks of weeds. Four weeds to each cultivated stalk. . . . On millions of our hectares weeds have pushed out cultivated plants.” A. G. Bragin, a Communist agricultural expert-, writes that one-third of the Soviet harvest is lost on account of weeds; that there are billions of them in every section of the country, that thousands of them come up from one seed, that many of them have taken root at a depth of 3ft or more, and that all the power of science and the will of the Communists must be used to beat back this powerful and dangerous enemy. The weeds are especially thick in the North Caucasus, formerly one of the richest parts of Russia. It was the granary, the garden of the country. Tlie best wheat came from there, as also the best meat, butter, fruit. One reason is generally given for this pitiful state of affairs. There is no incentive for the peasants to work when so much is taken from them and so little given in return.