ON THE LAND.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 55, Issue 299, 1 October 1935, Page 7

ON THE LAND.

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

(By ‘‘The Tramp”). The farmer with the least worry today is the man with 200 acres or under of good land with a clear title or not too big a mortgage on it (says the “Southland Daily News”). Mr J. Nelson of Dipton West, has 150 acres of nice sweet land from which, last year, he sold 380 lambs from 290 ewes, and 300 of them went direct off the ewes into the works. This excellent return was not obtained by any spasmodic methods of feeding, but by careful attention every day throughout the year. Anyone passing from Dipton to Lumsden cannot fail to notice on this farm the tidy stacks of hay made safe by neat thatching and tying, a great standby for any kind oil weather when other feed is scarce, Mr Nelson arrived from Westmoreland about niue years ago with his family, haying sufficient capital to start farming in a moderate way, and New Zealand would 1)0 immensely enriched by a few thousands of immigrants of the same type.

On the initiative of the Ayrshire Cattle Scciety several breed societies, including the Shorthorn Society, have protested against the importation of breeding cattle from Canada without any kind of guarantee that such cattle are free from tuberculosis, abortion or mammitis. The Ayrshire Society is particularly interested in this matter because most of the breeding cattle imported have come to Glasgow and are being taken on to farms in the south-west of Scotland. Ayrshire has an' enviable reputation for daily herns free from tuberculosis; and naturally breeders are alarmed at the incursion of unwarranted breeding cattle, from Canada. It is particularly galling to breeders of Ayrshires that Canadian cattle are allowed in freely while their cattle exported to Canada must undergo quarantine and testing which costs the breeder about £2O.

If the majority of farmers were as methodical as they should be, as we should all be, and kept a strict account of things in black and white, they would give far more thought than tney do to the purchase of a herd sue. Records would show just how much money some bulls in the past meant to them and how much money some bulls cost thdm, states the Taranaki Herald. Few men have failed to have disappointments with bulls, bulls whicn have probably destroyed the work ot years. If the actual money lost to them by the use of such bulls, the di - ference in actual! returns from progeny compared with, the returns iroin the progeny of the good hull they once owned they certainly would not make the mistakes they have made in the past when buying a herd sire. But, having kept no records, and forgetting, the lessons of the past, the cheap herd sire is again looked for, or the goodlooking one that has won a priz*v some show. Of course the only bull that is worth buying is the son ot a proved producer, and the more proved producers behind him the better, but even if he has good producing blood behind him he may prove a costly purchase if he is not an animal of good constitution, a masculine type that will indicate some hope of him passing on the good blood he inherits.

The report of the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 1934 contains a useful summary of the work on virus diseases. The work there was designed bv Dr. Henderson Smith andi the start of his department for more general study of viruses rather than the specialised investigation of the individual disease and the individual crop, anti the research now in progress continues to bear this character. . The precise nature of 1 a virus is still uncertain, and! the work continues to probe deeper into this question. It has been shown that the virus is almost certainly particulate, and not diffused throughout the liquids in which it is found, that it is of a definite size which remains the same, independent or the host from which it is taken-and that different viruses are of different sizesThe virus could not be obtained wholly free from nitrogen (says the report;, "nor could we substantiate the statement that it is crystallisable.; we have, in common with all other virus workers, failed to obtain multiplication in the absenco of living cells, and have produced some evidence that it is not, at least in the case of one virus investigated, an invisible stage m the life history of a visible bacterium. At present the position is that it is difficult to deny the living character of viruses, but their extremely small size, approaching molecular dimensions, suggests that they are alive only m a limited sense in which a gene is alive, and that they are incapable of independent existence.” . It lias been .shown and is now generally believed, that a virus disease is not necessarily a general systematic disease, as was at one time thought, but may be localised within the infected plant to definite circumscribed areas, in which the virus multiplies. The mode of movement of the virus within the plant was considerably cfaufied when it was shown, for the first time, that virus did not travel in, the water-stream, as had always previously been assumed!, but was associated witn living tissues only. A recent development, of which the further outcome cannot yet be foreseen, is the discovery that a plant inoculated with one strain, possibly ol low virulence, of a given virus, is protected against later inoculations with a second, possibly more virulent, strain of the same virus. The occurrence of strains differing from one another in one or more respects is coming into more and more prominence, and it seems certain that such strains may arise in nature as well as in response to artificial treatment.