Peer’s Farm

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 39, 16 February 1938, Page 9

Peer’s Farm

* BADICAL EXPERIMENTS. MOVABLE MILKING SHEDS. The adoption of moveable milking sheds and grass-drying, instead of haymaking, was recommended to farmers throughout the world on Saturday by Lord Cochrane of Cults, father of Group-Captain the Hon. R. A. Cochrane, chief of the New Zealand Air staff, when ho arrived at Auckland by the Rangitiki on a holiday visit to the Dominion. Lord Cochrane has the reputation of being one of the most progressive dairy farmers in the United Kingdom, with a herd that is surpassed in size by only one other, and he said he had practised these two innovations with considerable success.

Movable milking sheds had been built after consultation with advisers, he said, and their great advantage was that his herds could be milked without making a bog where the milking was done. Every day each shed was moved at least its own length,. and so the ground was never broken up. His grass-drying had been started, he said, because it had been found that the lush spring crop of grass in Scotland could be completely spoiled by a day or so of rain. His drying method, which was being gradually imitated by farmers in Scotland and England, not only preserved the greenness of the grass, but also destroyed a harmful element known as carotene. The grass drying cost more than haymaking, but the advantages outweighed the extra cost.

Another innovation ho had made which had been described as revolutionary, said Lord Cochrane, was wintering his stock out of doors without covers. Even snow or frost did not cause him to cover his herds, and, although farmers who had been following . liis example were still too timid to 1 copy him to this extent, he had found that results more than justified the ex- • periment. Lord Cochrane added that his experiments, even if they had seemed too revolutionary for other farmers, had been attended by remarkable results. They might well be followed with profit in other dairying countries, such as ' New Zealand.