A New Food for Sheep.

Hastings Standard, Issue 218, 12 January 1897, Page 4

A New Food for Sheep.

West Australia can boast a shrub ' which will prove; of great value as compensation for her droughts, and may yet revolutionise the meat-growing industry by turning practically barren tracts of country in the colonies into productive sheep runs. A contemporary gives the following particulars : There is one happy runholder in Western Australia, Mr. G. J. Brockman, of Manilya, who is apparently able to defy drought. His sheep have had no water to speak of for two years and absolutely none for 15 months, yet he is able to send draughts of thousands of fat stock to market, and they always bring the very top price, owing to the superior quality of the mutton. liis run is covered with " milk-bush," which nntil late years w r as considered useless. Mr. Brockman does not hesitate to say that his mutton is superior to that fed on anything else. In two years and a half he has only had what he calls " one dash of rain," and that was last •June twelvemonths, but in October he sent 4000 fat stock to market. The milk bush is still as green and luxuriant as in best of seasons, and the sheep fed on it do not seem to need water at all. Mr. Brockman recently sent to the Minister of Agriculture the fleece of a wild 4-tooth ram weighing 321b without the points, and yet he says that sheep " had never seen water in its life." He says he is the only man holding a " milk-bush run," but others have patches of the bush, and their experience confirms that of Mr. Brockman. Mr. Martin, of Cossack station, lost a number of sheep. They had strayed on to Cape Lambert, where there is no fresh water, but five months after they were found, not only alive, but " rolling fat." A Mr. Patterson had a similar case. It is not suprising to hear that the Government of Western Australia wants to spread the milkbush. The Minister of Agriculture wrote to Mr. Brockman for seeds, but in return received only a carcase of splendid mutton. Mr. Brockman's explanation was that he could find no seeds, which he attributed to the drought, the plants not having bloomed for the last two years, although quite green and luxuriant. It is curiousjthat the merits of this bush have apparently only just been discovered.