DANGER TO GREAT HARVEST.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 April 1921, Page 11

DANGER TO GREAT HARVEST.

WILL THE MICE RE-APPEAR. Sydney, March 7. There is marked Ineasiness in some of the great wheat-growing districts owing to the threatened re-appearance of the mice plague of some three years ago. Australia then enjoyed a bumper harvest, but owing to the shortage of shipping, the precious grain was stacked, in incredible quantities, all over the country. Then came the mouse visitation—an amazing, mysterious, highly offensive thing. The whole wheat country—Victoria, South Australia, and New South Wales—literally crawled with mice. There were thousands upon thousands of millions qf them —so many that the whole countryside stank with mice, and it seeiped impossible to cope with the plague. Their cost to the country, in ruined wheat, ran into millions of pounds. How they came, and where they came from in such incredible numbers is still a mystery. Human ingenuity devised all sorts of. wholesale traps, but the hundreds of thousands which were slaughtered were a mere drop in the ocean. Then diseases appeared among them—and in a very short time the plague was gone—whence none knew. Its going was almost as mysterious as its coming.

Again Australia is gloating over a wonderfully bounteous wheat harvest, and again the golden grain is being collected in great, unprotected stacks. And again, it is said, we are to have the mice. The irony of it is that New South Wales has spent millions in the construction of silos at all the wheat centres. In very many cases the wheat is stacked in bags right alongside the great silos. If it had only been within the great concrete structure it would have been quite safe from mice and weather and weevils.

A great row is even now being made owing to the non-utilisation of the expensive silos. ‘‘Official muddling” is what everyone calls it. It appears, that the silos have only just been finished, and the Government did not urge farmers to use them because it was feared they would not be sufficiently dry. Therefore the farmers bought their bags in the usual way and disposed of their grain, in bags, to the alert agents, instead of handing it over in bulk to the silos in charge of the Government. The net result is that although millions, have been spent on the silo system, which is practically complete, the country is. in danger of losing millions by depreciation in the value of the wheat.