THE FIREBLICHT MENAGE

Te Puke Times, 17 June 1921, Page 2

THE FIREBLICHT MENAGE

HAWTHORN MUST GO Wellington, June 15. A statement that steps are being taken by the Department of Agriculture to combat fire blight was made at the annual conference of the New Zealand fruitgrowers' Association to-day by the Minister of Agriculture, the Hon. W. D. Nosworthy. The Minister said his department had exercised all the care, and all the supervision possible: with the means at its disposal to combat the disease, particularly in the Auckland districr, by of eradication, but it was not easy. So far as he could gather the most up-to date method was to cut back trees, destroy everything taken oif, and sterilise the tools used, and draw a protective j belt across the North Auckland] peninsula to check the spread of disease. He was putting another belt lower down in Auckland district to prevent the Plight penetrating into Hawke’s Bay or the southern portions of the North Island. There had been a good deal of opposition on the part of farmers to the cutting down of shelter hedges consisting of hawthorn, but his opinion was that so long as there was hawthorn, in the country it would be liable to blight. He Was goiner to use every endeavour to induce Waikato farmers to go in for another kind of hedge. With the financial position as it was to-day it was a pretty big order to ask a farmer to replace his hedges with some other kind of fencing, and for that reason he had to ne judicious as to what he did. He had to be just and fair, but he was doing all that was possible as far as he knew to restrict the likelihood of fireblight spreading further,