The Secret Life of Joe Pazandak

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 469, 18 June 1948, Page 7

The Secret Life of Joe Pazandak

HOSE who see Joe Pazandak in action in the New Zealand wrestling ring this season are probably unaware that this solidlybuilt young American is a keen student of agronomy and took an arts degree and a B.Sc. at the University of Minnesota. Indeed those who see him in action may not be greatly interested in his academic qualifications, but this secret life of his is of considerable importance to Joe himself and in between bouts he has been putting much of his time into the study of New Zealand farming methods and into visits of inspection to agricultural colleges and research stations, As The Listener discovered when it interviewed him in Wellington the other day, his study of farming methods and production problems has made him as fervent an advocate of the "closed cycle" of production as Sir Stanton Hicks proved to be at the last Science Congress held in Wellington. According to Mr. Pazandak, the world of agriculture will have to turn to largescale composting of the soil within the

next ten years if soil fertility and present production-levels are to be maintained. And composting, as he understands the term, means putting back into the soil everything that came out of it. "You include in that city garbage, sewage, and similar waste materials?" he was asked. "T hate to hear the word ‘waste’ applied to sewage," he replied. "It’s the most valuable fertilising material you could have, and to put it back into the ground is simply the logical process. When a farmer markets milk, or beef, or mutton, he is actually selling ¢alcium, phosphorus, and various other soil constituents and natural nutrients, and these must be replaced if the fertility of the land is to be maintained. The farmer who tries to make do with synthetic fertilisers is not only burdened with an additional cash outlay against his crop, but is not putting back into his land all that he takes out of it. To have good soil there must be plenty of organic matter." As evidence of the damaging effect of what he called "cash-cropping" on soil and soil-fertility, he said that in the last 50 years the average depth of topsoil over the United States had receded from

10 inches to six. If the country were to continue feeding herself and exporting grain and other food to Europe those six inches of soil had ‘to be increased somehow. Soil productivity had also dropped during the same period, he went on, but that loss was not so obvious to the superficial observer, since the fall in yield had been offset by improved farming methods and the development of new types of food plant, notably improved varieties of wheat. In his own ‘state of Minnesota the use of purely chemical fertilisers has become intensified to a degree which he finds disturbing. Ten years ago, he said, they were hardly heard of; to-day 90 per cent. of the farmers are using them, and in his opinion they are the wrong diet for the land, or at least a very unbalanced one. | Must Have Meat "You hear a lot about vegetarianism," he explained, "but meat is man’s natural food-when I’m wrestling I may exert up to 50,000 foot-pounds in an hour, so I must have meat. Similarly, plants do best on the natural food of organic fertilisers.’ Where the addition of some chemicals to the soil was necessary, many United States farmers were feeding such chemicals to their animals and getting them on to the land indirectly and in a form more readily assimilated by the plant-life. Whatever the farmer did from his own resources, however, was hardly likely to stop the impoverishment of the land so long as most of the produce of the farm went to the cities, and the cities con-_ tinued to destroy their garbage and sewage instead of conserve it. "Has the composting of city sewage and garbage been carried out in the United States?" he was asked. "Not generally, so far, but it will be shortly. They are just beginning to realise its value now, and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the city refuse is already being processed, bagged, and sold on the market at a price which is returning about £20 (N.Z.) a ton to the city authorities." Other cities, he thinks, will have to change their ways and do likewise before it is too late and the land impoverished beyond hope of redemp‘ion, :