FARM NOTES.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 2 October 1914, Page 7

FARM NOTES.

At one of the Sussex County Courts recently Colonel Cody, an Courts recently Colonel Cody, an aviator, was sued by . a farmer for ' £20 for the loss of a cow killed by the defendant's monoplane on Cove | Common. The plaintiff said the de- I fendant abruptly descended in his ' monoplane on a cow, breaking the animal's back. A witness for the \ defence said that as the. machine ; descended the cow rushed from the i trees at it. The judge held that the < aeroplane was a dangerous machine, and gave judgment for the plaintiff for £18 and costs. '. A bulletin on milk fever from the Kentucky Experiment Station advances the theory that the disease is due to the toxine elaborated in * the udder preceding normal milk ; production. The success of the mod- ; crn air treatment is due to prevent- ! ing, by means of pressure, the ab- ' sorption of this toxine. Through !, the extreme dilation of the udder the ' . blood supplying the mammary gland j is greatly diminished until the milk ' gland has the opportunity to re- j sume its ordinary activity. There ! seems to be present in the colos- ; , trum of the cow suffering with milk ! fever some substance toxic to gui- i nea pigs. When you find out what your herd | ' is producing, decide on a certain I standard of cow and stick to it until you get cows that all come up to that standard. Then gra^ dually raise this standard by selling the poorer cows and replacing them with better ones. In the beginning your best cow may be producing 235 pounds of butter-fat a : year. Your neighbour, who started testing several years before you did, will probably have several , cows that show a 235 test, but i which lie is willing to sell because j his standard has grown to 260 or 275. Buy the 285 test cows and sell all yours that do not come up to that mark. Carry this work along from month to month, figuring up records and learning something all the time, until finally you have a herd of good cows that '. average 300 pounds of butter-fat a \ year. By that time you ought to j know enough about dairying by ac- j tual experience to be able to give ! proper care to a .herd of such valu- j able stock. . ! The Waikato Co-operative Dairy j Co., which was started three and j a-half years ago, is stated now to be the second largest in the Dominion. All the suppliers receive' equal payments for cream, Is. per ; lb. delivered at the nearest railway station, freight being paid by the company. : From tests made by the Queensland Agricultural College, it has been proved that seed potatoes wTiich , have been sprouted before planting have come up more evenly and have given better returns than seed which had not been sprouted. In \ Ireland, also, many trials have recently been carried out in respect ! to potato-growing in many of the counties, and the results confirm sprouting potatoes before planting. ' In the tests rande in Ireland, the potatoes sprouted in boxes, being for the main crop of late varieties, there was an average increase in the yield of two tons per aero from ; sprouting, and in every county the I average showed more or less of an i increase. During several seasons '■■ the increase from sprouting avera- j ged from 1$ tons to 2£ tons per ' acre. In 1910 the Commonwealth of j Australia, produced 14,734,465 bush- \ els of oats ; New Zealand grew 13,804,000 bushels. The Dominion did well, but her crop falls into in- { significance beside that of "barren " i Russia, which yielded 110,000,000; quarters —five times as much as the ; United Kingdom, and seven times as much as New Zealand. It is the \ United States which leads the way j as an oat-producing country,, its output last year being nearly ten times that of New Zealand. Ger- i 1 many is another great oat-produc- i I ing country, its yield last year being; I 57,000.000 quarters, France, with i ( 47,500,000 quarters, was the next j biggest competitor—the world's crop. being 469,000,000 quarters. Settlers on. bush country will be interested to learn of a New South Wales experiment .with the strychnine methods of destroying green j timber. A ring of bark was rej moved from a tree, and strychnine applied. Within three days the up- . per portions of the tree had died, and after a week or so two or three feet of the trunk below! the place where it was ringbarked had also died. But whether the roots of the tree will die remains to be seen. The majority of those who have witnessed the experiment consider that, should the trees be ringbarked I near the ground, the operation must ; result satisfactorily.