FARM AND DAIRY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XXVI, Issue 2501, 10 August 1893, Page 2

FARM AND DAIRY.

NOTES. A correspondent on the Plains a few weeks ago Bent as a South Australian paper in which the writer showed how farming could be made to pay with wheat at 3s a bushel. We see from a recent Australian paper that the scheme baa been discussed, and that meetings of farmers considered the claim nnproven as many items of cost had been under estimated. The Auckland Star says that orange growing in the North is fast superseding the culture of apples and stone fruits. Many Whangarei and Mongonui gargens and orobarda are golden with frnit. In the former place the cropß are especially large. In Kansas, U.S.A., only an inoh of rain fell all last winter. Mr Beginald Foster, a Son t her v sheep expert, asks : While we are exulting over the quantity of the lambs that we export, ate we not killing the rqobs that I&3& the golden egg — the earli'eHt maturing of oar ewe lambs, which should be reserved for ths better deßtiny of becoming the mothers , of our fotnre flocks, and of upholding that prestige which we are fast losing ? Speaking in Canterbury the other day, Mr Murphy, the well-known agricultural authority, said there was every prospect of a profitable trade in pigs for New Zealand. In Sweden and Denmark, but especially in the former country, every dairy farmer aimed at keeping a sow for every cow he bad, and realised from £5 to £10 per sow per ' annum. The pigs are grass and clover fed, and are sold for the manufacture of mess pork when they reaoh the weigh of 1401b. Great attention ia being paid to the dairy industry in Canterbury this year. Lord Onslow haa written to a friend in the colony to say tbat New Zealand mutton of inferior quality sells every, where as New Zealand at New Zealand prices; but New Zealand mutton of superior quality is sold by all the best known butchers as best Sootoh at Sootoh prioes. If only you could inform the purchaser tbat what be is eating is New Zealand mutton, you would find a very rapid increase in demand for it on the part of those who are prepared to pay a high price for a good article. It is not often tbat a good word is said for tbe English sparrow in America ; but

quite a new merit bas been claimed tbere ior tbe bird. It is credited witb the consumption of tbe larva of tbe bot fly aa they oome from horses, and tbe comparative immunity from tbis pest noticed in districts formerly muob troubled witb it is attributed to tbe sparrow.

The \atge rams wmnaUy paid out tor milk have (the Times says) put quite a new face upon Waikato farmers and settlers generally, as well as business men.

" Magpies are death on worms," said Mr Clifford at the Otago Acclimatisation Society's meeting. He urged that fifty or a hundred should be introduced to the oolony. They are magnificent song birds, they won't touch truit or grain, living entirely on insects, and they do all the work tbat the rook does at Home without doing the injury. He concluded his eulogy on tbe magpio by saying tbat it is tbe farmers's friend.

It is expected that a large area will be set in potatoes in parts of Waikato this year. Experiments recently carried out at one of the Scottish testing grounds go to show that pasture when eaten ebort does not supply half so mach nutriment to tbe stook as if allowed to grow, say, Bin. long. The leaves, acting as the stomach, as it were, digest the sap by exposing it to the sun and air, thereby causing tbe roots to extract their food from tbe soil. If the plant be eaten short it ia deprived of this power of extraction, and its value as pasture is in consequence greatly dißcouated. Overstocking, therefore, iB bad policy in more senses than one.

The ex-secretary for aagnculture, Mr J. M. Rusk, in tbe Nortb American. Review, draws a pioture of tanning in America a hundred years bence. He predicts tbat tbe United States will contain a population of 800 millions. Tbere will be so many mouths to feed that he thinks every acre of land valuable for tillage will be ocoupied, and that there will bs nothing left to export to the rest of the world. Tbe yield of wheat will have to be three-and-a-balf times heavier than the heaviest wheat crop that has yet been harvested in America. Dairy farming will be practised so carefully, tbat, instead of an allowance of one cow to four acres, four cows will be able to flourish upon one acre. Tbere will be many farms of a few acres. The larger farms will be. run by bighly-eduoated, scientific meai The poorer farmers will Ibe a thrifty peasantry, owning their homes and possessing a few aores of land, but depending chiefly for support upon wages made by labouring for others.