YOUTH IN AGRICULTURE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 800, 22 October 1929, Page 10

YOUTH IN AGRICULTURE

STATE TO SUBSIDISE CLUBS WORK FOR BOYS AND GIRLS Press Association WELLINGTON, Monday. The Department of Agriculture and the Education Department have lately given close consideration to reorganising the control of boys and girls’ agricultural clubs, and to granting further assistance to them. The last few years’ work is viewed as having been partly of an experimental nature, both with regard to the method of organisation and the national value of the work when properly developed. The present is considered a suitable time to extend the movement, and the Minister of Agriculture, the Hon. G. W. Forbes, has accordingly approved a scheme of control and assistance which provides, inter alia, for the following:—

Where any approved district organisation is set up to develop the movement, the Department of Agriculture will subsidise any funds that the organisation may collect up to a maximum of £4O, not more than two such organisations to be subsidised in any one education board district. The department is to have the right to appoint the chairman of any of the organisations that are subsidised. The Department of Agriculture is to provide the seeds and manures necessary for the clubs that are formed. The department will also suoply ail charts and certificates in connection with the work and all possible assistance is to b© rendered to the organisations set up The cup presented by Mr. W. Stuart Wilson, of Wellington, for annual competition among boys’ and girls’ agricultural clubs, has been won for the 1928-29 season by Dudley Tayles, of East Gore School, Southland, with a remarkably heavy crop of potatoes yielding at the rate of 31i; tons an acre. The runner-up was George Lovirig, Huinga School. South Taranaki, who grew an outstanding crop of mangels which weighed at the rate of 181 tons scwt. an acre.

For the purpose of comparing these two crops it was considered necessary to take into consideration their value. On the basis of the current values at the time of judging, the potato crop was worth £156, and the mangel crop was worth £135 15s an acre. In accordance with previous practice, the Department of Agriculture is presenting Master Tajdes with a gold medal and a photograph of the cup as a permanent record of his _ having won the competition.