Farmer Constructs Clearing Plant for £40

New Zealand Journal of Agriculture, Volume 63, Issue 1, 15 July 1941, Page 14

Farmer Constructs Clearing Plant for £40

uiiiiiitiiiiitiiiiiiiiiii By tiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiitiiu

A. D. MERCER,

Fields Instructor, Greymouth.

• the west 'bank of the Grey ON the west bank of the Grey River . between Greymouth and Blackball lies an area of good riverflat country that was cut over by sawmills and felled some 20 years , ago. At present ' it is a dense mass of gorse eight or , nine feet high, covering stumps and logs, some of considerable size, while many dead trunks are still standing. The type of country is illustrated in Fig. 1. - ■ Mr. D. Burt, who is farming in this district, has undertaken the clearing of some of this'land, and is very efficiently transforming . an unsightly waste into valuable - farmland which will eventually be carrying good pasture. • ' i A tractor engine costing- £3O and a winch purchased for £lO were mounted on a timber base, attaining both compactness and mobility. With 10 chains of wire rope on the winch (geared \42 to 1) a fair area can be cleared at one set. The first step is the removal of gorse, which is . either hand-cut or pulled in clumps by the winch and is disposed' of by burning. The stumps encountered are chiefly beech and rimu. The former are

readily pulled, while rimu stumps are first loosened with ' a few plugs of gelignite. All stumps and logs are stacked in heaps for burning, and as, with this method of stacking, there is no soil among the timber, it can be readily disposed of in this manner. Some of it is hauled over the river bank, and an idea of the size of some of the logs being handled can be gained from the accompanying illustrations. The work is being carried out by Mr. Burt’s son with the help of - a boy as spare-time work between milkings at the rate of one acre per month from the original condition of the land to level ploughable country,, but during the operations sound beech logs are sawn into lengths and split into laths for the Blackball mine, these laths’ paying for all fuel and oil used in clearing operations. This land is thus being brought into productive condi-

tion at the cost of labour of a man and boy and with a capital outlay of £4O. . It would be .inadvisable to attempt establishing permanent pasture on this land with the first ploughing. Lime at the rate of -1 ton per acre is the first essential with 2 cwt. of superphosphate. It might be possible with favourable weather conditions to work this land down sufficiently for a temporary pasture of Italian ryegrass and red clover, but the most suitable and profitable crop would probably be an autumn-sown mixture of oats and tares for early spring feed for cows or a spring-sown mixture for ensilage. The most obvious means of improvement in. West Coast, farming practice is in the provision of more winter feed. Mr. Burt’s achievement is a first step in the right direction.