NOTES FOR FARMERS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCVII, Issue 11188, 9 February 1897, Page 6

NOTES FOR FARMERS.

The heavy shower on Friday night was of great benefit to pastures, though a similar fall soon is needed to set the grass again, and bring forward the turnips. The weather is all that could be desired for harvesting, and rapid progress is being made with reaping, stacking, and threshing. Although failures and misses with the turnip crop have been the rule in the Ashburton district this year, there are still a few good paddocks to be seen. Mr Stringfellow, of Chertscy, on a piece of light plain land has an excellent crop that, notwithstanding the drought, has grown well, and will give a lot of winter feed. It would he interesting - to know how it is that these crops have escaped the general failure. Mr W. P. W. Buckley, of Dunsandel, has purchased the champion two-year-old draught filly of the colony, and she came up to his farm this week. The filly, which has already taken four first prizes, was bred by Mr Allan Jones in the western district of Southland, and is said by all the wood judges that have seen her to be the best two-year-old filly ever bred in the colony. She is by Mr Rogers’s fashionably bred horse Cavalier, out of an Extinguisher mare, and will no doubt be seen at many of onr shows next spring. Mr Buckley, who has already made a name for himself as a most successful exhibitor of light horses, and is now going into draughts, is to be congratulated upon having obtained such a grand filly. Mr J. Dobie, of Dumfriesshire, left for Home by the Tekapo, via Australia.. He was more than pleased with whiit he saw of farming in New Zealand. The cattle in southern Otago especially are far superior to what would be seen on similar farms at Homo, and the beef cattle on some of the Taieri farms even surpass those seen on the estates of some of the leading breeders and graziers in Scotland. The farming, too, is far in advance of what be expected to see in the colonies.

In a report in the Marl: Lane Express of Dec. 7 the following remarks on the clover seed harvest in England appear:—Red clover and cowgrass, total failure of this year’s crop. Cowgrass (single cut). —Little or no new seed. White clover.—A short acreage compared with last year; quality defective. Red suckling.—A fair crop and medium quality. Alsike.— Very little new seed, quality cannot be fine. Trefoil.—An almost total failure of the crop. An experiment with a view to ascertaining whether chilled beef can be safely shipped to England is said to have been successfully carried out recently at the Ross River /Works, Queensland Meat Export Company. The meat was kept for nearly two months under similar conditions to those of the voyage to England. The area of corn (maize) planted in all the United States the past season ' was 80,935j6D0 acres,, andthe-esthnated yield is

2.191.525.000 bushels. Indiana’s share is 141.081.000 bushels on 3,813,000 acres; Illinois, 249,423,000 bushels on 7,026,000 acres; lowa, 298,614,000 bushels on 8.249.000 * acres; Kansas, 256,592,000 bushels on 8,848.000 acres; Nebraska, 290.224.000 bushels on 7,953,000 acres; Ohio, 117,000,009 bushels on 3,017,000 acres. None of the other Stales reach 100,000,000 bushels.

The farms in Sweden vary in size from five to U f fcy acres as a general rule, although out of the 329,930 farms in cultivation there are about 3000 having an area of 250 acres and over. Owners cultivate 272,316 farms, and the remainder are presumably held under lease. Besides these farms there are 166,449 small crofts or tracts of land held by agricultural labourers in return for certain services rendered on set days to the owners. Agriculture is by far the leading industry in Sweden, as the following returns made in 1894 will show Orchards and market gardens, 87,397 acres; arable land, 8,371,748; natural meadows 3,774,158; wooded land 46,663,401'; other laud 42,709,543; total land area, 101,606,255 acres. The agricultural crops rank in importance as follow's: —Hay, oat, rye, barley potatoes, green fodder, maslin, wheat, roots, peas, vetches, beans and buckwheat, Mr Salter, of Wal Wal, has made some interesting and successful experiments in the cultivation of his crop which should prove of value to farmers in other parts of the district, says the Siawcll (Victoria) Times. In place of using guano manure in the ordinary manner, by spreading it over the ground, he has adopted a method of dipping the w'heat into a solution made of the manure before sowing it, with' surprising results. The use of 141 bof the guano used ns a solution gave equal, if not superior, results to those obtained from lewt of the manure applied in the usual way. The difference in cost where these quantities are used was about 7d as against 7s. Mr Salter has treated his last four crops in this manner with most satisfactory results, for while his neighbours’ crops have given but poor yields, his returns have been thirteen bags for 1 SO4, nine bags for 1895, and seven bags for the late harvest. During the last year four of Mr Salter’s neighbours used the solution, and. the yields were highly satisfactory in each instance. Mr Salter adopts the following means in preparing his grainHe" puts about 4)gal of water and 141 b of the manure to a bag of wheat, or 4gal of water and the same quantity of manure to a bag of oats, care being taken not to allow any of the solution to run away, the whole being mixed together in a bath or any place where the liquid may be confined. The grain is turned over three or four times, then bagged up and taken off to the field and sowm as quickly as possible. In every case in Mr Salter’s experience ho has found this to be productive of double the return gained from wheat or oats sown in the ordinary wav.