The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND SATURDAY, MAY 11, 1929 A GREEN FORTUNE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 660, 11 May 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND SATURDAY, MAY 11, 1929 A GREEN FORTUNE

GRASS, as the raw material of New Zealand’s export production, yields a fortune of £45,000,000 a year. This is the estimate of a British expert observer, a distinguished agrostologist, who has discovered that, as a founder of Empire, grass takes rank with the sea. Of every five pounds spent by Great Britain on overseas products, twenty-five shillings goes to something that is, in truth, “worked-up grass.” Ninety-four per cent, of this Dominion’s total exports is based on green pastures. These are among many interesting discoveries made by Professor R. G. Stapledon, Director of the Welsh Plant Breeding Station at Aberystwyth, who came this way three years ago in search of increased knowledge and improved health. He got both and returned home, to write a book about his pleasant experiences here and over in Australia. Grass, of course, was his first and greatest love, hut it did not usurp all his affection and keen observation. An English reviewer has noted with a sigh of regret that Professor Stapledon explains in his “brave and stimulating book” that, of the eighty cars he used in the Commonwealth and this Dominion, only 8 per cent, were British; that he had found all the long-distance motor services in New Zealand entrusted to American, cars; also that, in the main, agricultural implements were being made in American factories. There is always something to spoil the pleasure of observant Imperial tourists, hut perhaps the vexed professor’s chagrin would have been sharper had he learnt that some of the American agricultural implements were pioneered by formerly resourceful New Zealand industrial manufacturers. But the roving agrostologist, like our talkative politicians, was more interested in grass than in New Zealand manufactures. And, of course, he also noticed that, instead of using labour to rid the country of imported weeds and pests, the Dominion was importing different kinds of parasites to eat their pestiferous hosts. In his denunciation of gorse, blackberry, dog-rose and sweet briar there was sorrow for at least one British reviewer who, amusingly for New Zealanders, observed that “it is almost impossible to avoid a spasm of indignation when one hears these,plants described in such fashion.” Lovely New Zealand lanes of gorse and blackberry, and beautiful fields of ragwort: where are all our young poets? But man, even in New Zealand, does not live by grass alone. It may give him cream, butter, cheese, meat and Canterbury lamb, but it does not provide him or at least all his fellows with employment. The United Government consists of agrostologists, a word that need not he confused among its members with harsh criticism. True to type the Government believes in grass as the basis of New Zealand prosperity, and it is its intention one of these days, after talk about it has been exhausted, to spend millions of borrowed money on a laudable attempt to make two blades of grass grow where one blackberry now grows. Still, if the imitative Government follows the advice of Professor Stapledon and constructs thousands of miles of new fencing around small farms, each costing £2,000 for the weedy land, and distributes thousands upon thousands of tons of phospbatic manure and lime, might not there be a limit to the oversea demand for the products of New Zealand grass? It looks as though the prophecy of a bygone statesman is destined to he fulfilled. On a happy occasion a former esteemed New Zealand Prime Minister softened the austerity of an Imperial Conference by enthusiastically inviting his distinguished colleagues to secure proof of his prediction that this Dominion would become the dairy farm of the Empire by simply looking at its splendid rainfall. The honest man could not at first understand the reason for the crackle of laughter that disturbed the sedate dignity of the historic room in Downing Street, for he had taken a practical farmer’s view of rain and not that of a rascally milkman. And he was right, of course, about the value of a bounteous rainfall to the dairy pastures of New Zealand. The wisdom of agrostologists is great, hut it is not yet as valuable for Auckland grass as plumping rain quite frequently, though perhaps not on Saturday afternoons aruj Sundays. There are times when it would be provocative to boast about the wealth of Auckland weather, but there really is too little gratitude for its value. Where else in New Zealand may one find, as always can be found in this green province, such richness of precious vegetation as that which decorates fenceposts and telegraph poles, and adorns the King’s highway with grass and bramble and, in places, even the sweetbriar that pleases Englishmen ? Since the shrewd folk in the countryside have always known about the green fortune in grass, perhaps the town-dweller, inspired by the joy of a wandering agrostologist, will have more heart this week-end to mow his damp lawn.