AFFORESTATION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3899, 10 May 1937, Page 18 (Supplement)

AFFORESTATION

RUSSIA’S LARGE-SCALE OPERATIONS. New Zealand has done a certain amount of afforestation work to replace the denudation of native forests, but apparently our Dominion has a long way to go to equal the afforestation schemes in Soviet Russia. A copy of the Moscow News forwarded to us contains the following interesting information; Prospective afforestation plans for the Soviet Union embrace an area of 93,400,000 arcres. Virtually begun only in 1930, when the collective farms were established, afforestation has grown progressively over the past •six years until at present 362,450 acres are planted under trees. The four billion saplings of various species planted on the 362,450 acres were grown on 640 state .nurseries and 100 nurseries maintained by the collective farmers themselves. These nurseries are now supplying two billion saplings for afforestation annually. In tsarist Russia, afforestation was practically unknown, except on two large estates whose landlords planted

trees as windbreaks. One was Dokuchayev who had on his 7500-acre farm in the Voronezh Province 375 acres planted with trees; the other, Rostashevsky, of the Saratov Province had 125 acres afforested. Entailing vast expense and labour, afforestation has a Government appropriation of 50 million rubles for the current year. In carrying out this programme, collective farms are provided with engineers and technicians by the Commissariat of Agriculture as well as young trees and long-term credits for purchasing necessary materials. Collective farm agronomists and afforestation engineers and technicians jointly lay the plans and survey the land so that crop rotation will not be interfered with. Afforestation is being extended so rapidly on the collective farms that the problem of getting specialists has arisen. In order to meet the shortage of skilled workers, post-graduates of the country’s afforestation institute are being employed and special shortterm courses in the preliminaries of afforestation have been organised. The prospective afforestation programme taking in the vast area from Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea to Kuibyshev and Orenburg in the northern part of the country will treat areas varying greatly in weather conditions, iainfall and vegetation. Astrakhan’s

yearly average temperature is 48 deg. F; Orenburg in the north is 39 deg. F, while that of the central part of (lie country, Uralsk, for instance, is 31 deg. F. The rainfall variation may be seen from Rostov-on-Don’s yearly average of 18.8 inches, Astrakhan’s 8.2 inches and Kuibyshev’s 13 inches. The soil structure varies from a light forest variety, a heavy black clay grade and lighter black soils of the southern Azov district graduating lo the light chestnut alkali variety until it Anally terminates in the half desert alkali structures of the Caspian plains.