FARMING ITEMS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 4, Issue 1006, 22 February 1882, Page 2

FARMING ITEMS.

In the JDarling District (New; South Wales) there are two runs which each pass 600,000 sheep through the shearers' hands every year. : At Adelong, young milch cows, with' alfes at font, liaro been sold for 32s t» 355, owing to graziers investing in sheep. In the je*r 1788 there were only 29 sheep in Australia. At the present time ■ ihere are n» fewer than 62,000,000. . It is reported ihat 216 farms in Lan-" eashire are now affected with foot and mouth dise.iHe. , The English agricultural returns of this year, writes Mr James Caird, in the London Times, gives the smallest acreage'in wheat since 1867, when they were first established. The decline from 1808 (when theretui ns weremore accu rat e)ia 1,000,000 acres or one-fourth of the whole extent of thattirao. According to the Taranaki Herald, Mr: Grant one of the Lincolnshire delegates 1 ' who visited New Zealand some time ago has exchanged his two-thousand acre farm in; England for the ten-thousand acre sheep iunof Mr Tooth in Canterbury. Mr Tooth returns to the mother country, and Mr Grant comes out to New Zealand as a permanent settler. The latest addition to agricultural implements in England is the." steam digger," which is a combination of the plough and spado. In the short Bpace of an hour, and at a working cost of five shillings, it will run over an acre of ground and that, ton, in such a way as to produce superior cultivation. The inventor claims. that it wi.l do as much work as 170 men in a day. It appears to have withstood very exacting tests. '1 here are as many as 400 known species of grasses distributed over the world; and there is not a soil to whioh some of them is not indigenous. Some grow best on dry, sterile soils, others on rich land, some thriving best in marshes and wet places, and some on the sea-coast. Those that are best suited for permanent paslure thrive in luxuriance under cultivation, and are somewhat limited in number. compared with the entire species.