IMPROVING PASTURES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 April 1938, Page 3

IMPROVING PASTURES

REPLACEMENT OF POOR GRASSES. BENEFITS OF PLOUGHING. In farm survey work carried out during recent years in the southern half of the North Island a feature that half of the North Island a feature that obtrudes itself is the relationship between the use of the plough and the progress in production and income made on dominantly grassland farms containing considerable arable areas, whether such farms be sheep-farms or dairy-farms.

Twb distinct groups of farmers have evolved in communities where originally all the farmers operated under essentially similar circumstances, states the Journal of Agriculture. One group —and that greatly the larger—has been satisfied to carry on without any outstanding programme of pasture improvement beyond the improvement that arises primarily from top-dress-ing as a means of strengthening and repairing somewhat poor swards. The members of this group quite often, and especially when there has been improved utilisation of pasture growth, have made considerable and profitable progress, though at times top-dressing, even when supplemented by improved utilisation of feed, does not carry them far. The other group also uses top-dressing as a basic factor in their pasture improvement, but, in addition, makes use of the plough, at least fairly freely, as a step towards the replacement of inferior pastures by superior sown pastures. As a rule, the members of the latter group are substantially further ahead both in production and in net income than the members of the former group.

VALUABLE ARABLE WORK. The explanation of this usually is clear and simple. Judicious arable work has enabled poor swards—pastures in which open spaces or weeds or inferior pasture plants or all of these are prominent and in which good clovers and grasses are not prominent—to be replaced by good swards embodying a range of improvement otherwise attainable slowly, if at all. Very often it has been profitable to interpose quite profitable arable crops between the breaking-up of the old pasture and the sowing-down of the new one. The fullest success has been associated with consistent and appropriate use of truly permanent and highly productive strains of pasture species, assured supplies of which have been given to commerce by the official system of seed certification.

A review of the position indicates, firstly, that at least while considerable areas of ploughable land are occupied by inferior pastures, there will be considerable scope for profitable use of the plough—just what the position would be were all ploughable land occupied by high-class pasture is another matter with which we need not concern ourselves at present; secondly, that arable crops can play a profitable role in grass farming economy—arable cropping, if not fitted suitably into the work of the farm as a whole or if carried out in such a way as to be inimical to the wellbeing of the subsequent pastures, may be inadvisable and uneconomic.

The great proved profitable scope for the breaking-up and resowing of poor pastures raises among other matters, that of the cheapest and adequate supplies of suitable seed, and in this regard a question of seasonable importance is whether a greatly increased number of farmers, especially in the drier districts, could not with advantage undertake the production of seed to meet at last their own needs —a standard practice is to sow prospective seed-production areas in the autumn.