FARM SURVEYS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 158, 5 June 1937, Page 7

FARM SURVEYS

VALUABLE DEDUCTIONS. EXPERIMENTS IN HAWKE’S BAY. An agricultural survey of Hawke’s Bay, its nature and some of its preliminary results, formed the subject of an address to the sheepfarmers’ gathering this week by Mr It. P. Connell, of the Fields Division of the Department of Agriculture, who is in charge of the work. The work, Mr Connell said, was part of a comprehensive survey of the ecoI nomic structure and of the social services of Hawke’s Bay. The survey was inaugurated at the request of, and in co-operation with, the Hawke’s Bay Expansion League, which had given i financial and other valuable assistance ■ in the work. The work of the survey : in Central Hawke’s Bay had been j facilitated substantially by a local committee, of which Mr Mason Chambers I was chairman. The work was commenced in 1935 prior to the last general ! election, and funds which had allowed j an expansion in the work had been provided by the present Government. “An agricultural survey aims to secure, compare, analyse and interpret such facts as are available relative to all phases of inrniing, including such questions as land utilisation, farm organisation, farm income, costs, farm transport, and marketing, crop husbandry, and animal husbandry,” proceeded Mr Connell. “The survey is i concerned, first of all, with things as they are, and not as they ought to be. But it is fully recognised that in any normal farming district there is an immense store of useful information available as the result of the experience and experiments of farmers. Expressed in another way, every farm, whether the farmer himself desires it to bo so or not, is an experiment station of which the farmer is the director, and if we collect and properly interpret the experiences and experiments of a sufficient number of farmers, we may reasonably expect to obtain valuable guidance about: —(1) Things as they are; (2) things as they ought to be. i.e., the lines along which further progress may be made; (3) things of which the knowledge is insufficient to indicate how they ought to be, i.e., the unsolved problems of farming. Hence, it is hoped that the survey will provide a picture not only of what is being done in Hawke’s Bay farming, but also of how Hawke’s Bay farming -could be improved by better or more general application of our present knowledge and of wherein our present knowledge is deficient, the problems which still call for solution. In all three phases of this threefold 1 objective some progress has been made. GENERAL FEATURES. : “The work may be divided into two main sections—farm practice and farm * management—which, however, tend to merge into each other, at times, so that occasionally it becomes difficult jto say whether a matter is one of J farm practice or of farm management. * “In farm practice matters the unit of study is the crop or the farm animal, j Typical of farm-practice questions are: What soils are suited for lucerne? ' What fertiliser gives most economic results with mangels? "What seed mixture should be used in renewing a poor permanent pasture? What system of feeding will give the greatest pereentage of fat lambs? In farm management the whole farm is the unit of i study, and so each crop and class of stock and its treatment must be con- f sidcrod in its relation to the farm as j a whole and especially in its relation { to the.net total farm income. Typical t of farm management questions are j Should lucerne he grownj!. Should man- j gels he grown? Is it profitable to c renew poor permanent pastures? Does it pay better to get the greatest pos- g sible percentage of lambs fat off the c mother or to increase the number of j lambs produced and fatten some of them on rape? The good farmer right- f ]y makes his whole farm the unit of | consideration and tends to discount r any method of approach which seems . ito ignore this. For instance, he becomes , interested in lucerne growing only ill- r so far as it can be shown to increase s his net total farm income.” t The speaker emphasised that an im- c portant practical aspect of farm managciiient studies in which the whole farm was the business unit was that <, enterprises which separately gave un- t attractive net returns in combination f might give quite attractive net returns, f Under certain conditions arable crop- -v ping exemplified this. Oil certain farms 1 in Canterbury arable cropping for for- t age production alone, would not be c, worth while; arable cropping for cash- t crop production (grains) would not be c worth-while, hut the two were com- i bined profitably. “Whether a similar c position arises, or is likely to arise, t in parts of Hawke’s Bay, is a question l which is being given attention. Behind 1 this is the fact that there promises v to be a growing North Island market v for, say, barley and peas, to be used a in pig-feeding in the main dairying i districts. Cnn Hawke’s Bay profitably 1 participate in this, and at the same c time increase special forage production ' for use in its :'own sheep farming? c

SPECIAL FEATURES. “Two special features of the survey warrant mention,” added Mr Connell. “(1) Ail information given by farmers is confidential to the department; names -are used only xvith the express permission of the persons concerned, and when such permission is not given the information may be used in such a way that its source cannot be determined. (2) All findings or recommendations are based on actual local field results under conditions similar in essential respects, e.g., if liming is recommended its nature already lias been demonstrated in the field.”

SHEEP-FARMING ASPECT. Mr Connell then dealt in detail with survey results applicable to jslicep farming in Central. Hawke’s Bay. In the area considered, the following three farm-management types occur: (1) Stock fattening, in which fat lamb production is the major objective; (2) mixed breeding and fattening in which flocks are bred on the farm and some fattening is done; (3) store-stock production, in which stores and wool form the main items of revenue. “Because under condition which are suitable fat lamb production is the most remunerative type of sheep farming, excluding stud stock breeding, the possible exI tension of the area devoted to fatten- | ing has been studied. It is considered that expansion of fat lamb production on to some of the breeding and fattening country is economic', the profitable main means to such expansion being renovation of pastures and an extended regular phosphatic top-dressing programme on the good pastures.” Similarly, the mixed breeding and fattenin'' typo of management could be extended to what is at present store stock country in cases in which the individual farm contained a considerable amount of plouglmble country, the pastures of which could be renovated. 1 ft was pointed out also that extensive areas of the store stock country could be made to produce greater numbers of hoggets—a fact of importance j in regard to a future economic supply 4

of breeding ewes. . Other matters dealt with were the ■relation between flushing, of ewes ai»d the lambing percentages in the fattening country; the rate of double cropping, and the problems associated with the most economic top-dressing of both the better pastures and the poorer ones on unplougliable country m Central Hawke’s Bay. “To solve some of the mam problems a comprehensive programme of topdressing trials for the province is proposed This involves approximately 300 triale on the 100 soil types which have been defined in Hawke’s Bay, exclusive of the Heretaunga Plains special area, where the soil survey is- being carried out in greater detail, having regard to horticultural potentialities,” Mr Connell added.