Farm Notes.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4488, 13 November 1909, Page 4

Farm Notes.

■ THE RELATIONSHIP OF ■INURING TO MEAT PRODUC- ■ ' TION,

kis was the subject of a paper fought before the British Association Canada by Professor Somerville, no said:—lt has long been known at a large increase of herbage is cured from many classes of grass nd through the use of certain artiial manures, but in most cases the facts of the manures have been testl by simply weighing the increase cured. Sometimes the investigation

,s been carried further, and the

prbage grown with and without anure have been separated into its mstituent plants* and an attempt has

sen made to estimate the improvelent' in quality by the increase of ich plants as clovers, and the supression of such plants as sorrel and ;her weeds. Supplementary to such botanical separation the herbage has >metimes been submitted to chemical

Balysis, and an attempt has been Bmle to gauge the feeding value by Be percentage and absolute weight of Boteids, fats and carbohydrates, and By the digestibility of the fibre. All Bese methods convey useful informalon, but as the ultimate object of Boducing herbage is to feed animals, Bid as no laboratory method can Brfectly interpret the processes of the Bimal’s stomach, it occurred to me Bat useful information might be got fly utilising the animals themselves to ■ass judgments on the results. My Bork has been chiefly confined to Bperiments on grass land, and on Brass land they haye been chiefly conBrned with pasture as opposed to lay. In the United Kingdom there Ime 34,000,000 acres under grass Bpart from the mountain grazings), Bhd of this 24,000,000 acres are grazed ■nd 10,000,000 are cut for hay. Bo exclude stock from plots on a pasBire and to test the results of applying manures by weighing and analysing lie herbage, must lead to a fallacious lonclusion, for the reason that the mere exclusion of stock encourages Bne set of plants and represses another, ■nd the experiment resolves itself into ■ne not on pasture, but on hay. In ■ 899 the County of Northumberland ■ented a farm (Cockle Park) of 400 Imres, of which I was given the scientific direction. A clay field of uniform Character, that had been under pasture nf a poor type for many yeass, was Divided by fences into ten plots of fe 1.120 acres each. Three acres of each plot have been grazed by sheep each summer for the past thirteen Bears, the herbage of the sub-plot of i 1.20 ocre being annually made into Ihay, Specially selected sheep have ■been used for grazing the plots, the animals being individually weighed at the beginning of each season, and monthly during the progress of each grazing season. The health of the sheep on the comparatively limited grazing area of three acres has been all that could be desired, and any individual idiosyncrasies have been eliminated by the number of sheep (usually six to twelve) that have grazed each plot. The system of experiment (“manuring for mutton”) and the results have attracted a large amount of attention, and, aided by the Board of Agriculture, the experiments have been repeated, in part or in whole, in several parts of England and Scotland. It is only necessary here to call attention to the leading results, and chiefly to those obtained during the first nine years, the scheme being primarily designed to cover that period.