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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 7 (November 1, 1928)

“Top-Dress for Top Values.”

“Top-Dress for Top Values.”

Appreciating the importance of a widespread use of productive fertiliser, the Railway Department, through its Publicity Branch, will issue soon a helpful brochure entitled “Top-dress for Top Values.” Here are some passages:—

It is well known that the main basis of New Zealand's prosperity may be stated in one phrase—grass—land farming. In the aggregate of 18,830,000 acres under cultivation last year, pastures comprised 16,680,000 acres (nearly 90 per cent, of the total). Livestock provide, on the average, about 95 per cent, of the Dominion's exports.

Obviously any substantial increase of the national wealth must depend on an improvement of pastures. Nature, with her generous measure of soil-fertility, has been very kind to this country, but man has drawn heavily on nature's bank, which needs fresh deposits to replenish exhausted currency. Experience has proved for many farmers that top-dressing their land has top-dressed their bank accounts. The right fertiliser stimulates the money plant. A writer on superphosphate has declared that ‘super’ is the ‘supper of plant-life.’ Certainly ‘super’ makes two or more blades of grass flourish where only one had a struggle for existence before.

Reviews of the last dairying season have specially mentioned the importance of topressing in the surprisingly good returns from numerous farms. Some of the credit for those satisfactory results has been given to the Railway Department, which reduced the freight on fertiliser by 40 per cent., thus facilitating a large use of soil-stimulants.