QUEER EXPERIMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3899, 26 January 1929, Page 1

QUEER EXPERIMENTS.

PAPER IN GARDENING. “Correspondents from the United States and Canada continually send accounts otfl queer experiments in gardening and farming,” writes Sir William Beach Thomas, in the Spectator. “The value of all of them is probably exaggerated; but it is likely that invention and^ discover may do for production from the land what they are about to do for the coal industry. “The 'most promising of the aids to cultivation is paper. Rolls of rough short 'fibre paper can be made very cheaply out of almost any cellulose; and are now being manufactured to. the special order of intensive cultivators. The paper is laid between the rows of vegetable produce; lettulce, pineapple, strawberry, or what not. The paper serves a double purpose, if not a treble. It kills the weeds, so doing away with the need of the hoe, and it acts in, lieu of what is admirably called by all gardeners, a mulch; that is, it holds and censerves moisture. In such a crop as strawberries it might further serve for keep-, ing the fruit clean. Reference has been made to it as used by growers of Honolulu pineapples, but its .use is extending to many market garden crops and is likely to extend to more.

“Paper will probably be soon used in England for such purposes. The other ne'w American experiment! recently endorsed wh'ole-heartedly by the founder of the Brookings Institute in Washington, is of a scale probably too big for a little island. He prophesies the .coming of an agricultural corporation run exactly on the lines of the .Steel Corporation; and founds his .argument or the astonishing. success of a SlcottishAmerican engineer in Montana and of that other famous engineer, Mr. Henry Ford. The Scotsman grows wheat on factory lines on a farm of 100,000 acres, gets a fair yield (though nothing like that of English farmers) pays industrial wages and makes good profit. In old Hungary much more intensive units ■nearly as big in scale were known. One Particular farm was .equipped with its otwn railway and its 'own factories. All three examples illustrate a fact that has struck me again and again in many parts of the World (especially Australia and England) that the most successful farmers have been the engineers. Even a knowledge' of botany and biology are less useful than engineering ability,”