BRITISH RESEARCH

Hokitika Guardian, 19 July 1929, Page 2

BRITISH RESEARCH

FERTILISERS FROM THE AIR. EXPERIMENTAL WORK IN " . DOMINION. AUCKLAND, July 1(5. How manures are being obtained from .the air was told by Dr N. Annette a British agricultural' scientist who arrived from Sydney by the Marania this morning. / Some three years ago Dr. Annette retired from the Indian Civil Service. He had been lecturing on agricultural science in some of the Indian collets and on arrival in New Zealand he took an int .-rest in grass land farming. For i year he went on to a farm and milked cows and alftor he had gained a certain 1 amount of knowledge took up farming on his own acount at Matangi near Cambridge in the Waikato. He had intended to devote the rest of his life to his own experimental farm m an endeavour to help others on the land, but British Imperial Chemical Industries got into communication with him and he went to Australia to discuss scientific farming methods with representatives then in Australia. Now he is going to England and the Continent to do research work before coming back to New Zealand to give the Government and primary producer in this country the benefit of his further experiences, which will entail a study of “getting manures from the air,” as he explained it. “The British research station,” Annette said, ‘‘has been staffed by some of the best available workers in agricultural science, and when compleej it will be the best equipped agricultural research station of its kind in England. They hate moreover ,established advisory officers in many countries. The whole object o'f this work is not to boost the sale of nitrogenous manures, but to find out exactly on what crops and in what manner it will pay to use them. The biggest development in agriculture of recent years has been the recognition of the fact that nitrogenous manures.-when used as a supplement to superphosphate and potash enables dairy farmers to get a far larger return from their grass land. These results have been proved quite definitely in Europe. One had to be cautious in concluding that the same results Will be obtained in New Zealand. Imperial Chemical Industries sent a commission to New Zealand and Australia, consisting of men of, wide experience, and they concluded that this Dominion would almost certainly prove to be' a greater field for the use of nitrogenous manures than any other part of the world. They deputed Mr Lindsay Robb, one of the world’s Iforemost authorities on grass land farming to visit New Zealand and arrange experimental work in collaboration with the Fields Division of the Department of Agriculture. “The first season’s work has been so promising,” declared Dr Annette, “that Imperial Chemical Industries realise the necessity for a whole-time experimentalist to be detailed in New Zealand, and that is where I happen to come m. We have funds enough at our back to work in with the New Zealand Department of Agriculture and the Scientific Industrial Research Department, as well as Lincoln and Massey Agricultural Colleges.”