F. W. HILGENDORF

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24895, 7 June 1946, Page 6

F. W. HILGENDORF

SCIENCE ON THE LAND

The Memorial Address, 1946

This is the first.instalment of the text (slightly abridged) ot th, address delivered at the Canterbury Agricultural College. Lincoln by Mr L. J. WILD, M.A., B.Sc.. Principal of the Pending AgricultunJ High School, and formerly president of the Royal Agricultural Society of New Zealand. For permission to print it in this form we are indebted to Mr Wild and to the college Old Boys Association, under whose auspices it was delivered. I

In the morninc sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand for thou knowest not whether shall prosper either this or that. This, the sixth /erse of the eleventh chapter of Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher, is a prefatory text to Hilgendorf’s “Wheat in New Zealand.” It is from a book that he knew well, for he was at student of history, both religious and secular, and it has, I think, considerable psychological significance. I quote it here because I intend to revert to it and to some oth?r of the wise words of the Preacher. We are nearing the end of the first half of a wonderful century. . . . Discovery and invention have proceeded with bewildering rapidity. The word is used advisedly, because we have not been able to adjust our social organisation to our expanded productive capacity: we have not been able to adjust the flow of production in kind to the balanced re'quirements of society; we talk much of a balanced diet in relation to food, though we are not able to achieve it except for the favoured few; and we are not yet able to envisage a balanced ration of goods and services tor all human beings, and still less are we able to deliver It. We have improved, beyond the imagination of 50 years ago, our capacity to produce goods and our ability to transport them; but our social organisation breaks down under the strain of equitable distribution. The reason? “Scientific knowledge moves steadily forward; social reform plunges, rears, falls back to plunge again. In the matter of food—that first of human needs—the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture meeting at Hot Springs in June, 1943, declared: “This conference, meeting in the midst of the greatest war ever waged, has considered the world problems of food and agriculture, and declares its belief that the goal of freedom from want of food, suitable and adequate for the health and strength of all peoples, can be achieved.” The Crisis of Progress

Progress through this century has been most striking in engineering and industrial developments made possible by the technical application of the discoveries of science. At the end of last century we had seen the invention of the internal combustion engine. This century has witnessed the mass production of motor-cars, so that the aim is a car—or two—for every family in countries that enjoy what we are pleased to call a high standard of living. But the internal combustion engine has also given us the aeroplane and means of transport by land, sea, and in the air at ever increasing speeds. In direct line of descent is the rocket, from the development of which we may soon expect to have “The Times” of a Wednesday morning delivered in Christchurch on Wednesday evening; while transport in the opposite direction will deliver “The Press’* of Wednesday morning in London on Tuesday evening. Many of us can remember when there was no radio. Many of us have seen the motion film displace the “still” and the sound film displace the-silent-picture. Most of us will live to see the cinema threatened, to say the least of it, by television. If our mechanical powers of mutual destruction have increased beyond our social ability to control, there is some compensation in the progress of the healing sciences; tor in the realm of medicine, advance has been equally great if not so spectacular. think for a moment-of modern surgery, of the “artificial lung,” and of modern drugs such as the sulphanilamides and

penicillin. The race is not yet beyond redemption by its own efforts. . ™ Let us come back to that first tt human needs, already referred to? food. What of the progress in aeri culture, the oldest and the nin« honourable of the arts? Perhaps then! are inherent limitations here. . . •»%! Preacher, writing in a period of Jew' ish history when chaos and pessimism prevailed, gave the advice: “In tu morning sow thy seed and in tS evening withhold not thy hand* £ thou knowest not whether shall nrS per. either this or that, or whether ti£ both shall be alike good.” The Machine and the Drift to fit Town In 1898 Sir William Crookes in hk presidential address to the BritS Association for the Advancement of Science, forecast a world famine b» 1930, by which time he estimated tut the natural deposits of nitrate soda in Chile would be exhausted and there was in sight no other supply of cheap nitrogenous fertiliser io essential to wheatgrowing in Eurot* This provided a stimulus to researef and it was not long before our chemical engineers had invented several methods of taking nitrogen from the air and converting it into compounds suitable for use as fertilisers. Otherwise, in regard to the use of artificial fertilisers, there have been no major developments; indeed, the superphosphate we use to-day ta almost the same as that used s <W. ury ago, though there is evidence that we are on the eve of important developments in the treatment of rock phosphate. In 1901 the translation at Mendel’s paper. Experiments in PW Hybridisation (1865), was printed to the ’ Royal Horticultural Society’i Journal; and the study of heredity and the scientific improvement of farm crops and animals received I fresh stimulus. It my be said that the modern science ot genetics has been developed entirely since that time. Mechanisation of agriculture has been perhaps the most spectacular advance. The internal combustion engine bai given to agriculture a wide variety of tractors and of implements attached thereto. That and the use of thy electric motor have enormously facilitated the work in the milking, shed and in the woolshed besides providing amenities to country life. the mechanisation of agriculturo appears to have led not so much to increased production per acre as to increased production per unit of labour employed. In other words, H has contributed to the drift to the towns. This is a problem the solution of which is essential to national web fare, for The strength of a nation is closely associated with the quality and stability of its- rural people, and New Zealand needs a large and virile rural populattaß imbued with an appreciation of the true dignity of its calling and sensitive to ib responsibilities and obligations to the land ana to the rest of the community. . . , To-day our rural population would be much greater had the care of the land, its conservation, and its beautifieattoa taken precedence over its exploitation. These are wise words—they are Professor Hudson’s—and society must -find a path in that direction while there is yet time. ... I revert to the mechanisation of agriculture to remark that it has contributed to the exploitation of the virgin soils of new lands and. perhaps in consequence, this half century has seen an increasing awareness of the dangers of soil erosion. In this country we have abundant evidence the need ot prevention ... to the possibilities of soil conservation. (To be continued)