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Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 April 1938, Page 7

Believing that there is a very real danger of a similar tragedy in Canterbury, agricultural experts are devoting a considerable amount of attention to the history of wind erosion in the United States, where, in recent years, dust storms have swept all the arable soil from hundreds of square miles of country and deposited it elsewhere, burying farms and even villages (states the “Christchurch Star-Sun.”) Both the denuded areas and those where the dust has fallen have been ruined. Since a great part of Canterbury's arable soil is loose fine sand and silt windborne from the river beds and now consolidated by humus—a tragedy similar to that of America's “dust bowl” —is foreseen if the humus is taken out of it, as it was in America, by excessive cropping. There would then be every possibility, during a dry summer with strong north-west winds, of a dust storm starting that would strip large areas of their soil.