Minister : Plant more trees

The Minister for Lands and Forests, David Wordsworth, visited Dwellingup and Boddington to inspect soil research projects. He said that there is scope for Western Australian farmers to plants hundreds of thousands of trees on their properties throughout the agricultural areas of the state. Also according to Mr Wordsworth, most farms had been over-cleared in the past often because there was no economic value in the timber. Research in New Zealand had shown that up to 10 per cent of a farm could be planted with trees in belts without loss of production. In Western Australia, tree planting would benefit farmers by helping to reduce salinity problems which had developed with wide-scale clearing as well as through increased revenue from timber in the long term. Mr Wordsworth said that there is definitely a place for agro-forestry in areas where there are clearing bans because of salinity. This article contains an image of Jack Adams, the deputy president of the Plantagenet shire council, Mr Wordsworth and Harry Riggs, Albany's shire president, inspecting a pit dug by CSIRO, near Dwellingup. PLEASE NOTE: We are unable to provide a public view of this newspaper article as the copyright is held by the publisher of The West Australian. If you would like to obtain a copy of this newspaper article for research purposes, please ‘request a copy'. This article is part of the WISALTS (Whittington Interceptor Sustainable Agriculture Land Treatment Society Incorporated) Collection