FARMING IN WAITAKI, N.Z.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5581, 17 February 1879, Page 3

FARMING IN WAITAKI, N.Z.

(From the Australasian.) In the essays on “ Rotation, of Crops” published in the “ New Zealand Agriculturist,” and one of which we present elsewhere, we discover no statement either of the circumstances which have led to their being written, or of the exact text which forms the subject of discourse. Readers of the essay by “ Argumentum ad Hominem” will discern therein grounds for believing that the North Otago Association has expressed a desire to receive essays on the system of agriculture best adapted for the district of Waitaki, and such comments as we shall offer on the essay before us will be grounded upon that assumption. The writer has hardly got over the threshold before he begins to inculcate the exercise of “ wisdom and caution, foresight and prudence." He seems to imagine that the body for whom he is writing is anxiously desirous to make Waitaki one of the granaries of the world, and he wisely cites the warning of history, which “teaches that not one of all those countries which produced corn for other lands in the past have remained corn-makers.” Foresee in this, then, he virtually says, the probable future of this country, if you direct your to the growing of corn for other peoples :—“ Great Britain has contributed her share towards rendering unproductive the best lands of the United States of America, which have supplied her with corn, precisely as ancient Rome robbed Sardinia, Sicily, and other rich lands of the African coast of their fertility. Do we,” adds the author, “ not export both bread and meat ? What equivalent do we import ?” The warning note here repeated has been struck many times in tbe columns of the Australasian. Almost the only thought of tbe various Governments of these colonies has been how to encourage most effectually the production of wheat in quantities sufficient for export, regardless of the teachings of experience, which declares that a country which largely exports wheat must at no distant period become, agriculturally, a poor one. As surely as those countries above named were impoverished by growing grain for ancient Rome, and the older of the United States by doing likewise for Great Britain, will those occupiers of land in South Australia, the Wimmera, and the other great wheat-growing districts of Victoria, render sterile the soil upon which they are operating if they continue to grow wheat for export. Already in the whole of these southern and south-eastern colonies may be found tracts of country which are returned into pasturage (but not of the kind first broken up) simply because the soil has indicated its inability to continue to bear healthy and profitable crops of grain. That it has not been rendered as utterly barren as some of the plains whence the Romans drew their supplies of is owing to the comparatively briefer duration of the scourging process, and to the early return of the soil into pasturage. But let us not nurse the idea that the land returned to pasturage has lost nothing in the meantime, or that it is losing nothing now. Have the live stock carried nothing away in their bone or their wool. Does the production of milk not impoverish the soil, and is anything done to afford compensation for the robbery ? It has been said, and with considerable truth, that the lands which, in our dry climates, yield the best of wheats are not adapted for any of the systems of rotation which under the climate of Britain have become recognised as adequate to the maintenance of the soil’s fertility. The author of the paper elsewhere has recognised the fact that no one system of rotation can possibly answer the requirements of different kinds of soil, under different conditions of climate. “ Who has the effrontery to say that any one system is the correct one and the other two wrong ?” “ One mere circumstance may justify him in accepting the three years system, his right hand neighbor may with equal justice accept the four years plan, while his left hand friend may shrewdly adjudge the five years rotation as the best for him. There are those who will dogmatically assert that one certain cereal must of necessity, in good farming, follow another certain cereal, and that to depart from this rule is an infringement of an established law, making no allowance for possible circumstances. This is objectionable.” It is in the highest degree objectionable. He who continues to farm successfully during his generation, and to leave his land in as good condition—as fertile, clean, and productive as when it came into his hands will have earned the satisfaction of feeling that he has made himself master of the character and requirements of his particular block, and that he has done his duty successfully. But he is not on that account to proclaim that he has discovered a system of farming which all should follow, or which, if they do so follow, will result as happily as in hia case. Speaking generally, a long series of ro-tation-one in which grain crops occur with comparative rarity, and in which green crops and grasses largely predominate—are calculated to leave land in the best condition in the long run. In the last column of the paper will be found suggestions on this point which deserve to be carefully digested.