VALUE OF SHEEP AS MANURE MAKERS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 925, 12 March 1881, Page 5

VALUE OF SHEEP AS MANURE MAKERS.

Pasture alone is not sufficient to maintain sheep in profitable thrift, especially in the approaching breeding season ; in addition, a daily ration of grain is needed. When the pasture is poor, the quantity of grain should be liberal. With good pasture, a pint of mixed corn and oats, or rye and buckwheat, is little enough; with poor pasture, half as much again would be required to keep full-grown sheep, or growing lambs, in proper condition. In some sections cotton-seed meal is coming into great favor for feeding sheep on poor pastures, a half-pint being fed tb ; each one daily. It is a nutritious food, and makes an exceptionally rich manure ; and the quality of the dung of animals as a manure always depends on the quality of their food, for the dung is only the food changed by the processes of digestion, less the portion taken into system as nutriment. There is a mistaken idea, which has been fostered by writers who know little about sheep, that these animals have the unusual capability of living upon weeds, briers, brush, and coarse herbage, and not only of getting fat thereon, but of greatly adding to the fertility of the poor soil. A sheep, however, has no power to make something out of nothing. By reason of its fine mastication, and its vigorous digestion it can perhaps exhaust its food of more of its nutriment than any other animal except a fowl; and its manure, by reason of this finely comminuted condition, rapidly decomposes, and is at once effective as a fertiliser. To make our flocks thrifty to secure strong lambs, heavy fleeces, and good mutton—we need to feed the sheep, and we must do this if we would turn the flock into vehicles for spreading manure, and enriching the soil. It is a fact that sheep supplied with a regularly given ratio of one pint of grain per day, besides pasture, made in eighty days 201 b. 'each more

weight, than a flock on as good pasture, without grain ; and the value of the extra flesh more than paid for the grain. In addition, the fleece made more growth, a large proportion! of the ewes conceived twins, and the lambs came stronger and were better supplied with milk. And, as a matter of course, the droppings of the sheep must have been richer in fertilising value than, those of poorly-fed sheep. The good shepherd care th for his sheep, and he has his reward in the richest return that can be hiade by any of our farm animals, for the food and care given. Instances of the successful use of sheep as fertilisers of the soil are given so frequently, but v?itfioht any reference to the methods of their use, that it has become a general belief that nothing else is needed to make a poor farm rich.— American Agriculturist.