PUMICE LANDS PROVED.

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXXII, Issue 4228, 14 February 1921, Page 2

PUMICE LANDS PROVED.

VALUE FOR DAIRYING. DEVELOPMENT AT PUTARURU. THE TOKOROA DISTRICT. (By The "Herald's" Commissioner.) It is a far cry in more ways than one from the rich reclaimed mudflats and swamps of the Hauivaki Plains to the light pumice and rhyolite soils along the Taupo Totara Timber Company's line, and yet dairying is spreading on .these widly different classes of soil in a triuly surprising way. It is quite certain tha.t when the Hauraki lands were first thrown open to settlement a dozen years ago, there was not a farmer in the whole of the Auckland province who couhl believe, that he would ever live tp see the old Pi.akp swamp, as it was commonly called, yield a million pounds' "worth of dairy produce in one year. It is just as certain that even three years ago most Auckland farmers would have smiled at the suggestion that a dairy factory would be established on the Tokoroa Plains south, of Lichfleld, or that dairying 1.9,11 aon the pumice soils could be made to carry, and carry well, a dairy cow to less than two acres, and produce as much butterfat per acre as some of the high-priced lands of Taranaki. Yet .actual facts prove the case> in both -instances.,.. On the alluvial soils of the Hauraki Plains, m.ade rich by the decay of vegetable matter and the fertile elements brought from inland by the Waihou and Piako rivers, it needed little more than draining and banking to make farms which in a favourable season are simply rank with feed. Qll the light soils between Putaruru and Tokoroa iti has required agricultural skill and knowledge and persistence to make dairying country out of land deemed useless by the majority of people. The Hauraki Plains to-day is a triumph for the engineers ,and for their small army of ditchers and bankers ; the transformation of .the Putaruru and Tokoro,a lands is a triumph for the individual farmer,.. Almost any fool of a man can make money out of rich, virgin land, even if he lives on the capital nature has accumulated in the soil; but it takes a- farmer and a man to make money out of light pumice soils, and to enricK them at th« same time. Yet it can be done, and is being done, in many parts of,the South 'Auckland districts,. and it will be done, no doubt, still more extensively iji the future,.