Worn-out Pastures

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 16, 26 July 1892, Page 4

Worn-out Pastures

♦ In course of time pasturage will deteriorate, become worn out, tfJie constituents necessary for the building up of plants becoming gradually exhausted. Neither sheep nor dairy pasture will last for ever, however rich and plentiful the grass or herbn^e might have been at one time Running in the same paddocks year after year, with no change of pasturage, sheep cannot thrive as they would elsewhere on more healthy and wholesome runs. And it is well known, or shuuld be, how dairy-farm-ing exhausts the cloil, and particularly of one important constituent, phosphate of lime. As showing the amount of phosphate that may be withdrawn from the land by a herd of dairy cows, and the necessity of restoring that constituent from time to time, it has been calcutated that a cow yielding 750 gallons of milk per year will take from the land something like 231 bof dry boDe, or 401 bof first-class bone-dust, during- the time she is yielding the quantity of milk above specified. To this must be added probably 101 b more bone lor the calf that she produces. Thus dairy pasture loses by one cow at the rate of nearly half a cwt of bones every year, And if this phosphate is not returned to the soil, of course the herbage will goon suffer. But in addition to this loss of phosptr.ite some of the grasses—^ryegrass especially — may partially disappear, inferior plants in the shape of weeds taking its place. Hence the necessity for attempting to improve pasture that may have been partially worn out.