COLONIAL AGRICULTURE AND INDIGENOUS ARTS.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 145, 14 December 1844, Page 164

COLONIAL AGRICULTURE AND INDIGENOUS ARTS.

In the early part of the present year, a society for promoting the above objects was in progress of formation in New South Wales. The late reverses which the colony has experienced; has fully awakened the colonists to the necessity of developing the natural resources of the country, and the danger of placing their hopes of prosperity on a single article of export or manufactures. The prospectus of this society, first published in the Sydney Herald and afterwards in a circular, states at length its objects, which embrace those of the London Board of Agriculture and the London Society for the encouragement of Agriculture and the Arts. As this prospectus contains much statistical and other valuable information interesting to the colonists of New Zealand as well as to our neighbours ot Australia, we shall offer no apology for extracting from it so largely :—: —

" It must, we think, be obvious to every reflecting mind, that the calamities by which we have been overwhelmed might have been wholly averted had the interests of the colony been watched over by an enlightened board of agriculture and arts. We have seen that, during the years 1839, 40, 41, and 42, from which we may date the commencement of our general bankruptcy, we were drained of the enormous sum of £4,794,331 for the excess of our imports alone ; and, of this amount, the sum of £816,875 was for wheat or other grain. Our farms, from careless husbandry, and from modes of culture unsuitably to an arid and burning climate, were, at that time, as they now are, yielding but a small part only of the crops which they are capable of producing. They are, in general, badly tilled and badly reaped ; while the produce in corn is for the most part badly thrashed.

" The loss occasioned to a community from these evils, not to mention many others, is very great. It has, for instance, been shown in England that a saving of only lid. per bushel on wheat, from the diminution of labour by the use of the thrashing machine, on about 180 millions of bushels grown in that country (at the period of making the calculation), would produce the sum of £1,125,000; that the surplus measure obtained by means of the implement in question would be about 8,800,000 bushels, which, at 4s. per bushelj would produce another gain of £1,781,250, making in all the large amount of £2,906,250. Other eminent agriculturists report the saving to be considerably greater. It is also calculated that if the Hainault scythe for reaping, and the fanners, were generally adopted in England, the saving would be equal to a fifteenth of the whole consumption, which would almost enable that country to cease the importation of corn.

" facts of the same description may be inferred from the tenth volume of the ' Transactions of the Highland Society,' which asserts that hi no branch of agricultural labour has a more valuable advance been made from an old and inferior Bystem than in the use of the peculiar scythe there recommended. It performs double work, the seed is more quickly dried, and a considerable quantity is saved, which, by, the sickle in the hands of careless reapers, is generally dashed out of the ear, especially when they are fully ripe. ' When the corn is ripe,' says the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, ' the grain is ready to drop out of its husk. Agitatipg the Btraw, either from the wind or the act of reaping, will shake it out. In 1812, the wind shook out, throughout Scotland, eighteen bushels of oats per Scotch acre. All the modes of reaping are attended with the danger of shaking out the grains.' It forms, therefore, a most important subject for an Australian society to determine/ by actual experiment, what losses are occasioned by defective husbandry, and what implements are capable of diminishing the expense of labour and of increasing the amount of our produce, without augmenting the cost. Agricultural implements ought to be made in Australia at less price than they can be imported for.

" In many of our districts we sustain another loss, to a still greater proportional amount, from the neglect to adopt those modes of culture by which three-fourths ol the seed sown would not only be saved, but from ' which larger crops might be expected, especially in an arid climate, where it is important to bury the seed at a certain depth, to counteract the effects of a dry and parched soil. In England, the average produce, from drilling wheat, on a proper system of ro~ tation, after slaver or beans, is six bushels more per acre than could be obtained by the broadcast system; while the quantity of seed saved is about two bushels and one peck per acre. The Rev. Mr. Close, whose practice of drill culture is reported in the papers of the Bath Agricultural Society, anterior to the year 161Q, saved, in the seed of various kinds, the sum of £1,004 on 131 acres. He there calculates that a clear gain of jive millions sterling might, at that time, be made by England in the saving of seed corn alone; while twice that amount might be gained by increased produce. As to the first particular, he says there would be thrown away in seed fry* the broadcast method 8,000,000 of bushels of wfcieat, 3,000,000. of bushels of barley, 1,000,000 oOyf t 4,000.000 of ,oat«, and 1,000,000 of beans ! aty).a«ase. This .saving,, be remarks, in addition to the increased produce, would add . £15,000,000 sterling to the territorial wealth of Gwat Britain. Since that period the average produce of wheat-has been increased from about twenty-five to thirty-two bushels per acre; but, at they time of the lowest average, careful farmen wtire obianungt on the drill system, from tbirty-»ix to forty-two btuheU, while by towing

broadcast on other portions of the same land, they obtained from thirty to thirty-six only, making the difference of six bushels in favour of drilling, while the latter was performed with diminished expense. ~ " To apply the latter part of the above calculations to our own colony, it should be remarked that the quantity of acres cultivated in grain may, in round numbers, be stated to be 100,000 ; an increase of six bushels in produce, and a saving of two bushels in seed per acre, would supply 800,000 more bushels than we now possess, which, taking the average value of all the species of grain at 3s. per bushel, would realize £120,000. That sum, under ordinary circumstances, would probably exceed the value of our imported grain, for in 1842 the total value was £113,070. The preceding year, indeed, it had been £201,632; in 1840, £217,063; and in 1839, as high as £285,1 10; but these were probably exceptionable years. " Among the articles of export which we have strangely neglected to turn to proper account, is that of hog's lard and its manufactured products. The former of these realizes in the London market about the same price as tallow. When, therefore, we consider the more rapid production of the lard in comparison with that of tallow, no doubt can exist of its proving a lucrative article of export. It may be cut from the animal in flakes without deteriorating the hams, or certain parts of the pork. Nothing would be more easy than to breed, within the next three years, a sufficient flock of swine to supply a quantity of lard, and lard oil, and spermaceti, to great Britain, equal to its own consumption of tallow, which, in 1837, was 1,294,009 cwt. The value of that quantity in lard, lard oil, and spermaceti, at the lowest possible price, £2 per cwt., would be £2,588,018. " All fats may be converted into the purest oil, and into spermaceti called stearine, by saponiflcation with about sixteen per cent, of quicklime, the mass being subsequently decomposed,by four parts of concentrated sulphuric to three of lime. All that remains to be done is to thoroughly cleanse the substance thus produced, in water heated by steam, and to express the oil from the spermaceti by a hydraulic press. The oil finds a constant market at £44 per ton, and the stearine realizes about 2d. per pound less than the sperm candle. j "Now, we have in Sydney lfrge N Boap-boiling apparatus and hydraulic presses, and workmen for all the purposes of this manufacture ; yet, for want of some scientific board to impress upon the people a sense of their interests, and to institute these experiments, which are required in order to show that the art is sufficient}' lucrative for adoption, we leave that manufacture in the hands of foreigners, who drain us of our coin.

" Doubts have indeed been entertained as to the possibility of finding a uniform supply of food for so large a number of these animals. It may therefore be proper to remark that the Americans feed tHem in forests of oaks, chestnuts, and beech, which might in time be formed in Australia ; and many other modes, hitherto untried, might be devised for providing them with food at so small an expense as to produce returns of great profit. Our space will only permit us to notice one — the European method of sowing clover or herbage plants with barley and other spring corn, or even upon autumnal wheat, as soon as the blade has appeared. This, in addition to our swamps and natural pastures, would not only provide sufficient provender for an immense stock, but the clover or other grass sward, when ploughed up at the end of the third year, and sown with wheat, would ensure a more abundant crop of wheat. The standard works on agriculture are unanimous on that point ; and it may be a matter for serious examination whether the slender average of our wheat crops in New South Wales may not be owing to a neglect of the practice we recommend. All that is required for success, is to select that species of clover best suited to arid and hot climates, or to the soil on which it is to be employed. The trifolium incarnatum Deems to be preferred in Italy. The machrorhizum, or long- rooted clover, might be supposed to be the best for arid soils ; and De Candolle recommends a trial of the trifolium suaveoleus for clay soils. The Board of Agriculture, in its Report of the Agriculture of Essex (page 228), remarks that when the soil is tired of clover, at Bra dwell, tares are substituted, with equally good effect upon the crop of wheat. At Avely, clover is drilled, at an expense of 9d. only per acre for seed, between nine inch drills of barley — a practice which may in some soils be necessary in order to prevent a failure of the crop. We have at present only 17,320 acres sown with artificial grasses intermixed with oats, while, the number of acres sown with grain, and susceptible of some such simultaneous culture as that we recommend, exceed 100,000. If the whole of our wheat and corn fields were sown with clover, they would, after harvest, be converted into artificial meadows for two or three years; and they would be useful not only for the fattening of swine, but for improving the quantity and quality of our cheese and butter. An additional quantity of land must therefore be brought into cultivation for grain with the same grass; and as that would, in like manner, be converted into pasturage, more land must be •cultivated every year, until the first 100,000 acres shall have become what is technically called ' clover sick.' It must then be broken up tcr grain, intermixed with some other grass, for instance, lucerne.

" The expense of the gTaes intermixed with corn is so trifling as scarcely to deserve notice, when the farmer has grown his own seed. No tillage is required beyond that performed for the grain, which, it may be remarked, is improved, from the retention of moisture in the soil by means of the expanding intermingled herbage. An acre of clover produces from two or three cwt. of seed, which suffices ibr sowing from

twenty-six to thirty-nine acres when intermixed with the corn. Each acre, in England, in addition to the corn stubbles, will keep four large hogs for twelve mouths ; and we learn from the Report of the Agriculture of Essex, by Arthur Young (page 56), that a farm labourer's single acre attached to his cottage produced fifty-six bushels of oats simultaneously sown with clover ; which last, on the following year, yielded nearly six tons of hay at twice mowing. "The quantity of lard and its products, shipped to England by the Americans, is very great. They also supply the English market with salt meats, and with cheese of fine quality at 4d. per pound cheaper than the Cheshire cheese; so that increased exertions on the part of the colonists are required, even for securing a market for their beef and pork in England.

"The Times remarks — 'that if this competition on the part of America should induce the Irish to change their system of farming, it will do more for the poor than a hundred acts of Parliament. Competition will make both landlords and tenants look sharply about them fora time, but the produce of the soil will be doubled and trebled.' This may serve as a warning for Australians to be up and stirring. ' Sweet are the uses of adversity.'

" In the boiling down of sheep and cattle for tallow, there remains yet something to be done in order to secure to the settler the full benefit of that measure. From the bone, now generally thrown away, might be extracted glue or the same substance in the more refined shape of gelatine, for portable soup, either by immersion in very dilute muriatic acid, or by the conveying steam, at high pressure, on ground recent bones, in a spherical Papin's digester. A large quantity of fat and neats' foot oil may also be obtained from them ; but the quantity would be proportionally iess in cattle which bad travelled far. Bones, according to the analysis of Ber* zeliuß, contain one-third of their weight in glue ; but the quantity obtained by Monsieur d'Arcet, the manufacturer, is 54 lbs. from 180 of bones, which are contained in an ox weighing 900 lbs., without the hide or viscera. The hide of such an ox, supposing it to weigh about 80 lbs., would produce 50 lbs. of glue, and might consequently realize a larger profit at a station by being boiled down for that purpose, than if sold to the tanner; but, in order to make glue available as an article of export to England, the Home Government should be petitioned to allow its importation free of duty. So reasonable a request would, it is presumed, be at once granted, inasmuch as the best mode of enabling Australia to purchase the more expensive manufactures of Great Britain would be to find an outlet for its produce in that country; indeed, without that concession, Australia must launch out into the more complicated manufactures, which would inflict a mortal wound upon our father land.

" Phosphorus is extracted from the bone, after yielding its glue; and Prussian blue is made from the blood as well as from hoofs, horns, wool, woollen rags, and other animal matters.

" Several thousand pounds might be annually 6aved to the colony if, on boiling-down stations, near the wattle bark forests, the hides- of animals were tanned instead of being sent, at great expense of carriage, to Sydney for that purpose. The cost of conveying the bark to Sydney is also very considerable. These circumstances tend to enhance the price of leather, which might be produced on the boiling stations at one-third of the London prices. Manufactories of shoes should also be established on them : for the cost of all kinds of provisions might there be rendered so small as to make the manufacture of shoes, on the plan pursued at Northampton and other English provincial towns, a profitable speculation. The importation of shoes, to the amount of nearly three hundred thousand pounds, might be thus saved to the colony. " Sheep-skins should be tanned for export at the stations, or they might be made into parchment — an article which is nothing more than the skin first prepared in a lime-pit, and then stretched upon a strong frame, in order to be cleansed of the adherent flesh, and to be smoothed by pumice stone : yet so simple and lucrative a manufacture is lost sight of in a country where skins are thrown away on a dung-heap, while the operative parchmentmaker is condemned to seek employment as a day labourer. The skins, divested of their wool, by chloride of lime, are used in South America for the packing of tallow : the sinews of the animals being split into threads for the sewing of the packages. "The choicest Neapolitan harp and violin strings, which are made from the entrails of sheep, owe their superior quality to the smalf ness of the breed in that hot climate. Catgut should be made in Australia as an article of export. "The scientific Parisian, unlike the improvident colonist of New South Wales, turns everything to account. He converts into value even the minutest portion of a dead horse, not excepting the maggot it engenders : he obtains fat and glue from the bones, leather from the skin for women's shoes, Prussian blue fiomthe hoofs and other refuse. From part of the entrails ha makes catgut : he strews the remainder in layers, and covers it lightly with straw to keep it moist, whereby myriads of the large maggot, called asticot, or gentle, are generated, and upon which are fattened fowls. These gentles, which, being animal matter, must afford more nutriment than corn, are collected by bushels at the large public establishment called the Voirie, at Montfaucon, near Paris — a -place to which every dead or incurable horse is conveyed.' A cattle-boiling station might, with its soup, fatten pigs, and with its maggots turkeys, and, in fact, fowls of every description.. The, soup would be an incomparable manure for the watering of mangel wursel and other pkattyfor the food of dairy cows." _