LIMING THE LAND

Shannon News, 18 September 1928, Page 4

LIMING THE LAND

USE OF OLD PRACTICE.

Liming is an old practice known to (he Romans, and with the* advance of farmers' knoweldge of what may bn termed'the more "spectacular" man-ures,-.its uses have been .largely neglected and its value forgotten by many. Dr. H. E. Annett, lecturing to the Hamilton Dairy Club last week, said that while lime could not be considered a plant food, it entered very mueh into the composition of plants and was required by animals for the making of bone.

A milking cow took 3cwt. of lime off the land in a year. The skeleton of the growing animal contained a lot o? it, while a full grown cow's skeleton had the equivalent of Bcwt» of lime. A dressing of 3ewt. of limestone an acre a,year was required to make up these needs. Considerable losses of hmc occurred in land drainage. New Zealand was deficient in lime owing to the open nature of the soil and the heavy rainfall, and he estimated that 7cwt. of lime an acre a year was lost by this iueans. Those losses were made up to some extent by the application of basic slag, which contained half its own weight in lime and superphosphate, which contained gypsum, V a compound of lime. !

Lime played an important part as a conditioner of the soil. Without it soil became acid, and plants, would not grow at all. It not only kept the soil free from acids, b.ut also on arable land enabled cultivation to take place much more easily and quickly than would be the case if lime were not applied. It liberated the potash in the soil, and in consequence encouraged the growth of such plants as clovers. Certain manures, such as sulphate of ammonia, tended to make the soil acid, but this could be- corrected by the application of lime. The practice would ward off quite a number of cattle diseases, and there was one school of science which believed that milk fever was connected with a deficiency of lime. Dressings of from lOcwt." to 1 ton an acre every two or three years would keep the soil in good condition. A milking cow removed at least 381 b. of potash a year from the land, and to make up this loss it was necessary to apply roughly lewt. of 30 : per cent, pot-ash salts to the acre.