THE MANAGEMENT OF PASTURES AND STOCK.

Waikato Times, Volume X, Issue 716, 18 January 1877, Page 3

THE MANAGEMENT OF PASTURES AND STOCK.

(From the ' Australasian.'] Nothing is more common than to hear farmers Bpeaking of "the management of pastures" as though it were a practio apart from husbandry generally, and not, as it really is, the very foundation of tillage and stock husbandry. Pastures containing unwholesome herbage are not properly managed neither are those that are deficient of herbage adapted to maintain the health of the stock. If no choice is permitted to sheep, and they are obliged .to consume every poilion of vegetation upon the ground, their owner has r o right to wonder that disease is developed within them. If, on the contrary, they are placed upon rank and coarse pasturage, and are thus forced to consume feed of a description they are constitutionally averse to, disease will as certainly be developed as ia the proceeding case. It is not alway possible in practice to carry out the principles which commend themselves to the judgment as ci-rrect. That " seasons bent the best of farmers" is as true now as when it was first spoken. It is also no less true that each farmer must adapt his management to the nature of his land, and to the local conditions of climate. His selection of grain crops, of grasses and feed crops, his system of cropping, his ohoice of breeds and strains of live slock must all be subjeotto local conditions. It would be the height of folly to attempt to maintain a Leicester development of sheep by running them on the Welsh mountains j it would be equally unwise to place tl.e denizens of these mountains on the rich lowland pastures which have develope 1 the heavy frames of and shorthorns, lor though the hardier constitutions of the little mountaineers might prolong the fuht against unnatural.conditions, the result could be no other than fatal. By dint of a judicious measure of indulgence the heavy breeds of sheep have arrived at their present stage of development at whioh they can be maintained only by the exi rcise of a similarly enlightened course of management. It is morally oertain that breeds which arj the result of an artiflc : al system are less hardy than those which have always gained a living under purely natural conditions. In dealing, there ore, with the heavy long-woolled treeds of England as many Victorian flockowners have done—placing them on pasturage dense, succulent, and devoid of all those carminative and tonic properties which charuterise the natural food of the sheep —there has not been suoh an exhibition of judgment as intelligent husbandmen ought to have displayed. It is true that in certaiu years sheep in England and on the continent of Europe have been subject to diseases closely resembling those that are prevalent in variou3 parts of Australia, viz., fluke, worms, liver rot, &c. ; but the fact is not more Creditable to the old countries than to the new one. It only serves to show how cupidity causes even stern business men to disregard the teachings of experience in their haste to accumulate fortunes, for that is really at the bottom of the injudicious treatment our sheep have received, and the real cu°e of the mischief. The long woolled sheep of the Western district have not been starred for want of a sufficient quantity of food, hnt on the contrary, have been gor.ed with food too rank and succulent even to lay flesh on a bullock. If the owners of such valuable country were to manage it aright they woul I employ cattle, as English farmers do, to prevent so rank a growth, and at all times use them to clear off the rough patches which have been left by the sheep. They would adopt the plan commonly pursued in the rich valleys in England, of keeping the sheep off the rank pastures in those parts after the midsummer. The Cotswold system of grazing sheep in the water meadows up to June, and then removing them to the upland, has been referred to on many previous occasions, but we again mention it as an illustration of the judicious management of pastures very similar in character to those in which disease has been so rife in the Western districts of Victoria, hut which are not allowed by their intelligent occupiers to neutralise in the latter that which they have conferred in the former. The pastures in question are ir» June resigned to the mower or to cattle, experience having shown that sheep fed on them after that dale are invariably attacked by fluke. And yet in the district where this danger is so imminent, fluke rarely attains such a development as to impair the health of the stock. The flockowners not only know of the danger, hut. unlike those nearer home, they take care to avoid it.