PASTURAGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 43, 20 February 1929, Page 21

PASTURAGE.

The management of the pasturage is too often faulty. In the fat year, provision for the lean year which might follow is neglected. Reserves in pasturage during the good year should be hold in hand for the bad year. This can be accomplished by restricting the grazing on portions of a farm; where possible, by mo-wing superabundant grass and stacking it for future use; and, in some parts, by growing fodder trees and shrubs in protected paddocks, to be used only in times of stress. Even if jlvrlicious selling were resorted to, the policy of grazing to the maximum capacity during good seasons leaves the farmer in a quandary when protracted adverse conditions follow. At best it is a speculative enterprise making for instability in his business. The best feed for livestock coming off pastufcMs corn silage. It is succulent and nourishing. Stock that is on pasture needs a supplementary ration and silage fills the need. Since minerals are more readily assimilated when the animals have free access to sunshine And are eating jbu£.

culent food, the use of mineral supplements to the diet- is urged when the herd is on pasture. The actual need of the crops for lime as a food is relatively small and manysoils distinctly sour can probably meet, in one way or another, the needs of ■many crops in this respect. It is undoubtedly as a master key to all the soil processes on which fertility depends that lime is of greatest importance, and one of its main functions here is to be washed into the drainage in combination with substances which, if retained in the soil, would be intensely harmful.