FRUIT GROWING

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1536, 7 August 1901, Page 59

FRUIT GROWING

(By G. Hamilton Grapes, Paraparaumu.) The views .of a portion of those in the Auckland province w T ho are opposed to that urgently required measure, the Orchard and Garden Pests Bill, becoming law, having appeared in the “Times/* permit me, as chairman of the committee cited, to lay the facts before the public. The statement that only ten per cent, of those present were commercial growers is absurdly inaccurate, as reference to the delegate list will prove. The whole of the fruit growing districts of the colony, with one exception, were well represented. Every consideration was shown to liberally discuss the- Bill, both in and out of committee. Of the seven members of committee, representative of seven principal provinces, five were commercial growers, one was a representative of ten horticultural societies, and one a leading South Island specialist. The experiments referred to, owing to a peculiarly wet season, were necessarily incomplete, a fact freely admitted by the Auckland men themselves. No mention was made of the gist of

the matter, which is that, under th® revised Bill, as recommended by my committee and endorsed by the recent colonial conference of horticulturists just held in. Dunedin, any county may petition for the suspension of the measure within its boundaries. If, then, the contention of the Aucklanders be correct, that their province is the hub of our fruit industry ; they surely mus’t have an overplus of power to apply their own remedy. The actual fruit acreage is 9000 acres in the Auckland province and 14,000 acres throughout the rest of th® colony.

To go no lower than the surface, it is glaringly unjust that the major portion of our orchards, which are comparatively free from that dreaded scourge, “the moth,” should be rendered liable to infection from the unclean orchards of the North. Not only this, but our nascent export industry, economic fruit production upon modem lines, is gravely threatened in that the most suitable portions of the colony as yet unplanted are laid open to contamination by the introduction of infested nursery stock, fruit and fruit cases.