EXPERIMENTS WITH COCKSFOOT

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19624, 21 May 1929, Page 11

EXPERIMENTS WITH COCKSFOOT

TO THE EDITOR OP THE PRESS. Si r ,—I would like to thank "Interes ted : ' for his instructive letter about sowing; cocksfoot on Banks Peninsula forty years ago. The basal fact that will explain bis valuable observations, and confirm his suppositions, is that every sample of cocksfoot contains a vast number of different strains, with variations of tho most striking "type. If plants are dug up from any held, wherever it may be, and are grown separately so that they can be closely observed, it will Lie found that some have broad leaves and some narrow, some brown oft' in the winter and some remain green, some start early in spring and some late, some produce much seed and some only a little, and that the best produce four or live times as much leafage as the worst. All these differences doubtless occurred in the field your correspondent, harvested so many years ago, but at that time, and indeed as recently as ten years ago, the fact had never'been recorded, and so it is little wonder that it escaped notice. When these strains were sown on the Peninsula Hills some of them throve better than others; many died out, but those suited to the conditions survived, and so we have now living on the hills cocksfoots, of different types certainly, but all suited to the soil, climate, and grazing conditions that they are subjected to. It is a simple case of natural selection. If Danish seed were sown on the hills some of the numerous strains in this seed would die out and others survive, so that as your correspondent suggests, if Danish seed were sown here, and its seed harvested after four or five years, the progeny would be quite different from the original plants. the importance of all this rises from the fact that among the different strains that are included in every line of cocksfoot, the ones that produce most leaf produce least seed, and the ones that produce least leaf produce most seed; and we should be happy to demonstrate this, and all the other differences indicated above, among the hundreds of the strains of cocksfoot now growing at the College, to anyone that cares to call.

!' In some countries cocksfoot is grown primarily for seed. The plants are spaced and inter-cultivated, and all get an equal chance to survive. As a result those that produce most seed are most largely represented in the seed harvested, that is, those that produce least leaf predominate in the seed, and therefore that seed is of a bad type, if it is sown, as practically all cocksfoot is, for the production of leaf. Pen--1 insula seed on the other hand is grown as a pasture—ail the plants are crowded together, and they grow under grazing conditions for year after year. The result is that the leafy types crowd out those that produce less leaf, and finally when, in. some special year, the paddock is allowed to run to seed, only the leafy types are harvested. That is what makes Peninsula seed the best in the world. It is a mixture of leafy types, specially selected by Nature -and management, for grazing--conditions. The essentia] fact is that the- cocksfoot paddocks are grazed for long periods and are shut up for seed only occasionally, instead of being kept and managed entirely . for seed production. That this estimate of the value of Peninsula seed is not a matter of local prejudice may be seen from the following facts:—ln the Welsh Plant Breedino- Station bulletin on "Sensible Seed Mixtures," October, 1928, the mixture of seed recommended for permanent pasture is: Italian rye, 61b; perennial rve, 151b; cocksfoot (Danish), 31b, cocksfoot (New Zealand), 71b; etc. Tn the East Anglian Institute of Agriculture (Chelmsford), bulletin No. 3, 1928, wo find ; "Standard mixture for perennial pasture—Perennial rye, 161b-, New Zealand cocksfoot, 101b; Timothy, etc. Both these quotations are verbatim. It is well known that the supply of seed from the Peninsula has declined during recent years. Many reasons for the reduction of tfee supply have been offered, but one of the most important of them is this. With the increasing acre of the pastures the seed producing, relatively leafless, strains have been dving out and only the leafy ones of poorer seed-producing capacity have survived. The seed is getting smaller in supplv because it has been getting better in quality. Such seed is almost too valuable to sow for ordinary pasture When it is sown on the plains as mother seed definitely for the production of lines of seed which can be sold under some such description as once off Akaroa"-then the . ™md«ftd natural selection of the Peninsula Hills will be being used to full f^-antoge. One word more—the ternr 'New Zealand cocksfoot" used in the journals quoted is somewhat perturbing. It St be advisable for exporting merchants to specify "Afcaroa" or "Penrnsu]a/'_Your,j. etc. mIX}EN - I)0RF . Lincoln College, May l&th.