DETERIORATION OF GRASS LAND.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1900, 27 March 1880, Page 4

DETERIORATION OF GRASS LAND.

•So long as a grass field grows about the ■asual quantity of grass, and the cattle eat it, the occupier U too apt to rest content with the good or bad reputation earned by particular fields, without any attempt to alter it for the better, or oven to ascertain whether it is not gradually getting worse. In early life I learnt a lesson on this point which I have never forgotten. A neighbouring gentleman mowed about fifty acres of his park annually, and, not being a farmer, he believed that grass was gi'ass, and made equally good hay whether he went to the expense of manuring it or not. He was also remarkably indifferent on the subject of quantity, saying that he kept a fixed, number of horses and cows, and if in a good season he had a large crop, they ate it all, and in a bad season they made it do ; so that he stuck to his system as loDg as he lived, and the land got no manuro but what the horses and cows made. I was thoroughly acquainted with this land, and much interested in watching the result. The produce grew gradually loss — not year by year, or the owner would have taken the alarm; but each droughty year that oame produced a worse crop than the preceding dry season, until I have seen the produce of fifty acreß oarried home in nineteen cartloads. The quality, too, had fallen off quite as much as the quantity. In one part of tho park where the the land was light, one kind of grass (A vena flavescens) had taken almost exclusive possession of the land, and neither cattle nor sheep would graze on this portion, except in the moßt desultory way, a mouthful here and another five yards farther on, picked up on the move, showed what they thought of the system ; and oven the hay was sorted over rather than eaten by the cows, a large portion being deliberately rejected and trodden under foot. This is an instructive instance, showing that the produce of grass land restored to it annually, less the value abstracted from it by the animals fed on it, will not, when continued for a length of time, prevent ordinary graßs land from gradual but steady deterioration. It elso shows how much more rapidly light land deteriorates than that which is stronger. The park in question after being mown for many years, was certainly not worth more to Ist than 20j per acre on tho lighter, and 30s on the stronger land ; but after ten years' continuous pasturing, with occasional manurand top'dresaings, it became worth 50s Eer acre all round. —From "Dairy Farming," y Profe3sor Sheldon, for January.