WIDESPREAD EROSION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 August 1938, Page 3

WIDESPREAD EROSION

SOIL SURVEY OF DOMINION URGED. t SERIOUS POSITION DISCLOSED. “The fields committee, in its investigations in hybridism, was everywhere confronted with the appalling fact of widespread erosion in every gully on every watershed,” states a passage. in the annual report of the Native Plant Preservation Society. “One gully head had,'in the brief interval of six months, eaten into a fertile valley no less a distance than one hundred yards. “Fundamentally, erosion is an ill resulting from injury- to the vegetable cover —bush or grass. But a knowledge of the proper treatment of that cover depends upon various factors — primarily, the underlying soils. Certain forest lands may be properly cut over’ and cultivated; others should be left entirely alone. “Certain eroded cultivated areas should be put back to grass; others may remain in cultivation if the proper crops be planted. Both problems can be solved only by persons having a specific knowledge of soils and their qualities, and also of plants. “A complete soil survey of New Zealand should be made, soil types and series found, so that the productivity, habits and idiosyncracies of each soil be noted. It should then be possible to determine what areas are fit for cultivation, what areas should be restored to forest, and what areas should be kept in pasture. “It should be possible, in other words, to return to the grass that which is the grass’s; to the forest that which is the forest’s. “It was not for nothing, not by chance, that grass or tussock ruled on the plains, and forests covered the uplands and the hills for thousands upon thousands of years. Nor is it by chance now that only the healing humbleness of grass can save the blowing, flowing earth from wind and water. “The present generation argues about the equitable division of the plenty it should enjoy, but the soil itself, the only fountain of that plenty, wastes out beneath its feet, wastes and runs through the broken trees and the torn sod. “Primarily our special concern is for the rarer forms of native plants to conserve them, but our investigations have made it clamantly clear that erosion, from whatever cause, must be halted.”