SOIL FERTILITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 389, 6 December 1946, Page 22

SOIL FERTILITY

Sir,-The article on Soil Fertility by Dr. H. L. Richardson may have the effect of discouraging the use of organic manures to overtake the rapid depletion of soil fertility in New Zealand. It is necessary to relate the facts about Chinese methods to our conditions and problems. I do not know of any weight of opinion in New Zealand favouring the use of sewage in the way mentioned by Dr. Richardson, but there is a growing body of practical people, backed by the most modern agricultural and medical science, who have found it impossible to obtain soil fertility and produce of flavour and quality with the exclusive use of artificial fertiliser. Merely to decry the primitive Chinese method and to refrain from mentioning the development from such methods of Sir Albert Howard’s sanitary Indore method of composting wastes, is not constructive. ’ The Rothamstead trials of artificials have been effectively disposed of by Howard as unscientific and non-practi-cal, while the tesult of 4,000 years of Chinese farming, however insanitary, is continued soil fertility and a remarkably virile peasantry. As to pollution, that factor does not arise with the use of composted wastes; in fact, the increasing pollution of our rivers and harbours would be eliminated by the production of an odourless fertiliser that would restore the health content to our vitamin-deficient fruit and vegetables. South Africa, faced with soil

problems, has done this with great benefit to the land, and what satisfies the health authority of South Africa should be good enough for us. Let us be practical and not be sidetracked by extraneous matters like Chinese nightsoil. Surely the people's health is more important than the profits of interests that benefit from the Rothamstead experiments.

ALAN R.

STEPHENSON

(Auckland). —