PERMANENT PASTURES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 428, 6 January 1912, Page 6

PERMANENT PASTURES.

The chief veterinary surgeon of Victoria recently called the attention of farmers and stock-breeders in that State to the necessity of improving pastures, and said that the important noint to dwell upon was not the actual fertiliser to ba employed, but the absolutely urgent necessity of realising the foolishness of attempting to establish and maintain permanent grass land on a starvation ration. There is a big drain on the phosphates of the land when young stock and milking cattle are used to graze down the pasture, said he authority mentioned, and this has to be made good, otherwise the grasses will run out, and he enforced his arguments and teaching by referring to the results obtained at Rothamstead, the experiments carried out there having exercised a wonderful influence all over the world. The vaiours species of grasses are differently stimulated by particular manures; even among the grasses themselves such a difference of habit as a deep or shallow root system will determine to which manure the grass will respond. The aspect of any meadow represents the results of severe competition among the various species represented. The dominant species are those most suited to their environment —that is, to the amount and nature of the plant food in the soil, the water supply, the texture of the soil, and other factors. If any of these factors be altered by manuring in different fashions, the original equilibrium between the contending species is disturbed, some species are favoured, and increase at thu expense

of the others, until a new equilibrium is attained, and the character of the herbage from a botanical point of view is completely altered. The fallacy of the belief that grass land is not responsive to fertilisers is shown by a glance at unmanured plots which have become so impoverished that weeds have come to form nearly 50 per cent, of the produce. On one portion of a plot at Rothamsted farmyard manure was applied annually for the first eight years at the rate of 14 tons per acre, and the good effects of it are still to be seen in the yield after a lapse of many years. Experiments have shown that when nitrogen was applied singly and continuously the effect was to squeeze the legumes out alotgether. The plot manured with ammonium sulphate became sour, and did not yield so well as the nitrate of soda plot. The superiority of the latter is probably due to the fact that it sinks deeply into the soil, thereby encouraging deeperrooted plants which are better able to obtain moisture and nutriment in times of drought. And. further, the soda helps to make potash available. At Rothamsted, on another plot, on which phosphoric acid only was used, the grasses and clovers have : "run out" to an even greater extent than on the unmanured plot. This illustrates the result of continuous single manuring. An occasional dressing of phosphatic manure gives a striking result, because plenty' nitrogen and potash are lying iatent in the soil, but when persistently applied weeds usurp the place previously occupied by nutritious grasses.