FIRE BLIGHT.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 June 1921, Page 5

FIRE BLIGHT.

COMBATTING THE DISEASE. ACTIVITY OF DEPARTMENT. By Telegraph —Press Association. Wellington, June 15. A statement of the steps being taken by the Department of Agriculture to combat fire blight was made at the annual conference of the New Zealand Fruit-growers’ Association to-day by the Minister of Agriculture (Mr. W. Nosworthy). The Minister said his department had exercised all care and all supervision possible with the means at its disposal to combat the disease, particularly in the Auckland district. The mean* of eradication was not easy. So far as he could gather the most up-to-date method was to cut back the trees, destroy everything taken off, and sterilise the tools. He said that he had taken steps to draw a protective belt across the North Auckland peninsula to check the spread of the disease. He was putting another belt lower down in the Auckland district to prevent the blight penetrating into Hawke’s Bay or the southern portions of the North Island. There was a good deal of opposition bn the part of farmers to cutting down shelter hedges consisting of hawthorn, but his opinion was that, so long as there, was hawthorn in the country, it would be liable to blights. He was going to use every endeavor to induce Waikato farmers to go in for another kind of hedge. With the financial position to-day it was a pretty big order to ask the farmer to replace hedges with some other kind of fencing, and for that reason he had to be judicious in what he. did, and had to be just and fair, but he was doing all possible, as far as he knew, to restrict the likelihood of fire blight spreading further. Mr. Nosworthy said the orchard area planted in the Dominion was practically 35,000 acres for commercial purposes The orchard tax would be abolished at the end of this year. Up to the end of last year £BB,OOO had been loaned to the fruit-growers of the Dominion. He favored a central horticultural college rather than the establishment of horticultural experimental farms all. over the country. He advocated combination, and pointed to the lessons set by dairy farmers in this respect. Mr. J. Loughton, president, advocated increased production, and referred to the possibilities of a return to pre-war prices and wages. In his opinion sufficient pip fruit was planted for the export and local markets. He estimated' this year’s crop of apples would produce little under a million bushels.