Farming Facts and Fancies

Northland Age, Volume IX, Issue 17, 1 December 1939, Page 2

Farming Facts and Fancies

Electrically-driven milking machines ‘ in North Canterbury have increased ! from 42 ten years ago to 160 to-day. * ☆ Cf One novelty at the Windsor Royal Show was a pig-house heated by means of an electrical tubular heater. It pays to make pigs comfortable. ☆ ☆ ☆ British falmers have to fit shutters over their byre windows so that when milking is done by artificial light no l light must show. This is part of the air-raid precautions. ! ☆ ☆ ☆ One aspect of the new meat prices is the rise ip the value of ewes. Restrictions on shipments last season made ewes worth only 6/- or less, but they will now return from 14/- to 15/-. ☆ * * “It is easier to convert a town worker into a farm worker than to turn a conscientious objector into a soldier.”—Mr. J. G. Bai’clay, M.P., on farm volunteers. * ☆ * A hundred thousand tons of British apples are being turned into concentrated fruit juice, jellies and treacle. That may be an example for the Dominion’s surplus apple crop. ☆ * ☆ Ingenious Russian cotton farmers now spread about a hundredweight of fine coal dust on every acre of their cotton fields to absorb more heat from the sun and hasten the ripening of the crop. ☆ * * In response to anxious inquiries as to a shortage of imported chemical manures, the Minister of. Industries and Commerce replied that there would be ample supplies in the near future. * * * The Western Canadian wheat crop, which largely supplies the Englishman’s daily bread, is estimated at 435 million bushels, 87 per cent of the to*, three grades, compared with 78 per cent last year. ☆ ☆ ☆ The X-ray machine can now be used to picture the flavours of cheese owing to an invention of Dr. S. L. Tuckey, of the University of Illinois, U.S.A., who has been awarded a thousand dollar prize. The taste appears on the plates as a series of concentric rings.