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Te Ao Hou, June 1962, Page 8

United States research may revolutionise kumara growing in New Zealand. A young Maori from Te Kaha will go to study at the University of Louisiana, which has developed more than 160 strains of sweet potato. Mr D. M. Perry of Opotiki said in announcing this recently that the coastal strip of frost-free land between Opotiki and Cape Runaway could become ‘the bread-basket of New Zealand’. A soil survey was being made of the area and with advances made in sweet potato growing in the United States, productivity could be increased enormously. Mr Perry said he had always thought of New Zealand as the world centre of sweet potato growing—but that was until he visited the University of Louisiana recently. The results obtained there with sweet potatoes had been amazing. ‘It has revolutionised the economy the State of Louisiana’, he said. Many farmers who had previously made a bare living were now driving around in luxury cars and making a lot of money with sweet potato crops. Mr Patrick Wahanga Hohepa, a lecturer in Maori in the anthropology department at Auckland University, has been granted a Ngarimu Scholarship for a year's post-graduate study abroad. He will spend it in America, at the University of Indiana, where he will study for a master's degree in linguistics. Mr Hohepa comes from Waimea, in the Hokianga district. He attended the local Maori primary school, and went to secondary school there. Later he gained a scholarship to study at Auckland University, and subsequently graduated with an honours M.A. degree.