FARMING NEWS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 183, 4 July 1936, Page 4

FARMING NEWS.

RURAL RAKINGS. It is estimated that about 700 tons of onions are still held by growers in the Pukekohe district. Complaints of consignments of indifferent quality having reached the Auckland markets are accounted for by some growers having apparently taken advantage of auction to dispose of a certain proportion of culls. . . At Otakeho, Taranaki, 30 sows and 30 store pigs grazed for five months on four acres of oats sown in the autumn. The pigs had access to water and, apart from being fed for two weeks on boiled meat, had no other feed. The results were reported upon as quite good. Several varieties of swede and turnip which are highly resistant to cluliroot have been introduced, and have been put under thorough trial in competition with standard varieties, chiefly in Southland. After several years_of trial the Bruce turnip and the Wilhelmsburger Otofte swede have proved highly resistant. It is not too much to say that the use of such varieties as these on badly-infected land means the difference between a reasonable crop and an utter failure in many cases.—Otago Daily Times. Of the 16,500.000 acres of permanent grass land in England and Wales, not 300,000 acres can be regarded as fully productive. The rest wants ploughing up and resowing. This was the startling statement made before the Royal Society of Arts in London recently by Professor IL G. Stapleden, foremost grass land expert in the country. The usual methods of grass land farming throughout Britain, he declared. are entirely obsolete and should be scrapped. They have remained unchanged for at least 150 years. The Inch Clutha district has long been famed for its swede crops, and during the recent judging of the field crop competitions an opportunity was taken to weigh some individual roots, says the Otago Daily Times. feer - - oral of these were found to weigh over 301 b. apiece, while the heaviest was 381 b. In one weighing, when one drill half a chain in length was taken, the average weight of the individual swedes in the row was 20Jlb. This crop was inclined to be “gappy." otherwise a yield of over 100 tons per acre would have been recorded. The work on the different wrapping papers which might be used in the packing of butter had now ben finalised, said Dr, F. H. McDowall in an address at Dunedin on the Dairy Research Institute’s work. It had been shown that the parchment now in use was superior to the majority of wrappers which had been put forward by various interests as possible alternatives. Parchment had the v-iy important property of making a closer contact with the surface of a block oi butter than most wrappers, and it was now being supplied practically free from metallic contamination. The only wrapper with superior qualities to the parchment now in use consisted of a layer of metal foil between two layers of parchment. And of the two alternative metal foils proposed for this wrapper, tinfoil and aluminium foil, the latter was the only one commercially possible. The use of the 3-pl> wrapper would involve ail additional cost of about li per box of butter. It would give considerably better protection against primrose colour, the action of light, mould penetration, and timber taint than did the normal wrapper.