VALUE OF TURNIPS.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20260, 31 July 1937, Page 26 (Supplement)

VALUE OF TURNIPS.

WHAT THEY CONTAIN. LARGE WATER PERCENTAGE. “Chemists miy tell us that roots contain about 90 per cent, water, but, as the farmer said, it is ‘sweet water,’ and just as there are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of, so there are probably more things in a turnip than the chemist has yet detected.” So said Mr J. G. Stewart In a wireless talk on homegrown feeding stuffs in England. “ Even grass, the super food, is 80 per cent, water, of which all doctors say we drink too little.” Mr Stewart has always considered that kale and rape prove really satisfactory substitutes for pasture. He believes that one means of relieving the present stress is to concentrate on just as much plough-land as we can do well and grow full crops. Although valuation tables still seemed to indicate that it was more economical to sell cereals and buy maize, and even to sell beans and buy decorticated groundnut oake, there was more to It than “starch equivalents.” The man who bought nothing he could produce for himself seldom went 4 broke.”

Mixed crops, he declared, are often more productive and more economical than pure crops. He spoke of a farm where 30 cwt. and often two tons per acre of a mixture of beans and oats is regularly grown. The seeding is three and a-half bushels of beans and two and a-half bushels of oats broadcast. The great advantage of such a crop Is that it will stand up and can, therefore, be liberally fertilised, and it reiquires no more labour to speak of than a crop yielding half the quantity mentioned.

If farmers could produce grass and supplementary forage crops where necessary for eight months they would ibe, during that period, independent of feeding stuffs for the average sort of dairy cow. This would only mean spending on fertilisers —the one commodity that was still relatively cheap.