ERADICATING RAGWORT.

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3251, 5 November 1932, Page 5

ERADICATING RAGWORT.

Sir,' —I was astounded to learn from a press report that arrangements have been made between the Labour

Department* Public Works Department, and Agriculture Department, to organise unemployed labour with the hcped-for co-operation of County Councils, in eradicating ragwort by spraying; which is the slowest, most inconvenient, and costly method of doing the work. More particularly am I surprised at this imbecile decision, because the Department of Agriculture is fully aware of all the above defects in spraying as compared with the sodium chlorate and lime system, which is cheaper, more effective, and can be used at eight times the speed of spraying, neither does it require any apparatus. The cheapest efficient knapsack sprayer costs £4 2s 6d. I notice from the report that farmers are required to buy the sprayers and the sodium chlorate, provide transport for workers or contribute toward their cost.

Let me just give comparative figures. A farmer would have to provide a sprayer for each man. Say, for example, he had engaged two men. That would mean an outlay of £8 5s for two knapsack sprayers or a Davis bulk pump which would cost more. If these two men worked hard and had water available, handy, they would take one day to do one acre, using about 201 b. to 251 b. of sodium chlorate. The water, of course, assuming it is available, has to be sledged out and the supply maintained during that day. We need not take into consideration their transport, or keep, because that would occur anyhow, but for the cost of the two knapsack sprays (£8 ss) the farmer could buy 13 tons of crushed carbonate of lime, which with very little more sodium chlorate would provide enough of the mixture to do 52 acres, which could easily be broadcasted at the rate of 8 acres per day by the same two men, occupying in all 6i days as against 52 days occupied in spraying, besides getting the manurial value of the lime which most farms badly need, and which reacts to superphosphate topdressing, which can be applied within a week of the sodium chlorate and lime mixture. Furthermore, if it takes two men one day to spray an acre, a farmer with 200 acres of ragwort country would be smothered with next year's crop before he had half got through that of the present season.

Government tests (see Journal of Agriculture, August 1931) show that on a measured acre it took two men seven hours to spray it and cost £l, with sodium chlorate at 4d a lb. With the sodium-lime treatment it costs 15s 6d, with sodium chlorate at 4Jd, but we do eight acres in a day, compared with one. If the .spraying method is to be undertaken, there will probably be at least a fortnight's delay in getting labour organised; but I think the biggest hitch will be caused through the inability of the promoters to find any farmers sufficiently insane to buy sprayers when in another month the landscape will be yellow with the flower,, when by using the sodium-lime mixture now, their farms could be cleaned up in a fortnight by two men. —I am, etc., . W. E. CAYLEY-ALEXANDER. Pio Pio.