Victory Over the Desert

The world's deftest job of land reclamation was going great guns this week in southern Australia. Every fortnight, the Australian Mutual Provident (life insurance) Society plans to turn out a new, 1,000-acre farm. The land it uses is part of the "Ninety-Mile Desert" southeast of Adelaide, covered until recently only with sparse, unhealthy scrub.

The Ninety-Mile Desert was a painful puzzle to Australia's early settlers. Its rainfall was 20 inches a year, which is good enough for dry Australia, and plenty for many crops. But somehow, nothing desirable grew there. Even sheep did not thrive: they got strange diseases, and their wool turned to coarse hair.

Just before World War II, scientists found that the sheep disease was caused by lack of cobalt in the soil. When minute amounts of a cobalt compound were added to the sheep's salt, the mysterious disease disappeared.

But dosing the sheep with chemicals did not help the vegetation of the desert. So the scientists went to work again. Recently they found that lack of zinc in the soil was what sickened the plants. Some crops needed copper too. So the scientists added small amounts of the two elements to test plots, which responded at once with good crops of oats, clover and alfalfa.

Now much of the Ninety-Mile Desert is turning to excellent cropland and pasture. It looks as if 4,000,000 acres can be added in this easy way to Australia's productive area, and the scientists are looking around for other apparent deserts.

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