IN a recently published economic survey of the Australian wheat growing industry, it was reported that nearly two-thirds of the farms surveyed in Western Australia were located on lateritic sand plain.
As a random selection was made of the eighty farms that were visited it is reasonable to conclude that a similar proportion of all the State\u27s wheat producing farms are on that type of country.
This constitutes a remarkable change from the earlier days of wheat belt settlement when the sand plain soils were regarded as virtually useless and by-passed for development.
It is the purpose of this article to give a brief account of the agricultural development of those soils in the south-western part of Western Australia and to consider the factors which have been responsible for the change
