THE FARM.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 933, 17 January 1890, Page 18

THE FARM.

WOOLWool is the covering provided by nature !jo protect the animal from inclemency of the weather in cold climates. It forms an important part in the manufactures of the world, and although it gives employment to such vast numbers of people, it is but little understood. It is a very complicated material, subject to rapid and marvellous changes ; the health of the animal, the soil, food, and climate, all affect the wool to a very serious extent, as do also most substances brought in contact with it, often destroying its manufacturing properties. Great losses and the reputation of a large clip have often been lost simply from the application of strong chemical substances to the fleece, such as arsenic, strong alkalies, and lime, which destroy the yolk, injure the fibre, and stop -the growth, also resinous matters which are often used m sheep dips, and drying upon the wool form a kind of varnish, Scourers say it is more easy to destroy the wool than the resin that has dried upon it. Nature provides yolk to nourish the wool and prevent it drying up and becoming brittle, and also protects the serrated fibres that surround every length of wool. It may be remarked that wool, like hair, is a hollow tube, and that outside at short intervals there is a ring of short prickly fibre growing out which forms the felting properties of the wool, and the more perfect these are the better the wool will be. The yolk, while . promoting the growth, protects these, small fibres, and anything that removes the yolk causes these fibres to lock in each other, and the wool then becomes matted and lessened in value. In combing these fibres are torn off, for they cannot be separated, and the wool cannot be restored to its natural condition or to its original manufacturing value. Disease will sometimes have a similar effect upon the wool, by arresting the secretion of yolk. The question of wool growing is one demanding keen perception, wide experience, and scientific knowledge, and perhaps nowhere is there a wider field for learning and study, nor one more lucrative ; it tvill repay the sheep farmer enormously, it will tend to largely increase the value of his clip and the weight of the fleeces. High prices may be paid for valuable rams in vain, if experience and judgment are not wisely applied ; certain chemicals and improper dips cause a gradual deterioration of the sheep’s constitution,' great detriment to the fleece in quality and quantity, and o'ten death of the sheep at changes of temperature. The fearfully erroneous idea that the more poisonous a dip i 8 the more effectual it must b 9, is a serious mistake that has been fostered by unscrupulous supporters of poisonous dips, and is a moat unfortunate opinion. The poisonous dip that will kill sheep rapidly, is not the poison to kill insect life. he damage that is done by improper sheep dip is simply incalculable. THE PERCENTAGE OF SCOURED WOOL. Unwashed merino wool shrinks from 50 to 80 per cent in scouring. The lightest and choicest Australian medium, unwashed, will

yield 60 per cent of scoured wool, and the heaviest Mestiza bucks’ fleeces will yield about 20 per cent of pure scoured wool. The merino fleeces grown in Texas and on the western prairies of tho United States yield from 20 to 35 per cent of scoured wool. Unmerchantable Ohio fleeces yield from 37 to 40 per cent of scoured wool. British and Canada wools yield from 70 to 85 per cent of scoured wool. Crossbred washed Ohio fleeces yield from 60 to 80 per cent of scoured wool, (rosibred Western American prairie fleeces yield from 30 to 50 per cent of scoured wool. Tub-washed wools and crossbred sheep generally yield from SO to SO per cent of scoured wool. There is more wool grown on each sheep than formerly, the average having doubled in twenty.five years. In 1860 the product was bs per sheep, while in 18S5 it had risen to 51bs. ’Phis is due to the grading up of the common flocks, and improving them with the use of superior rams, and better care being taken of sheep. The farmer will find it useful snd profitable to keep sheep suitable to the requirements of his maikets. Unfortunately, many sheep owners abroad have not a very extended knowledge of wool, which is divided into two classes for the manufacturer of worsted and woollen goods ; for worsted goods the long staple wools of the Lincoln, Cotswold, and Romney Maish breeds are selected, aud ill some oases the sheep improve by exportation to the colonies, especially New Zealand and T & Bmania, «hore they thrive remarkably well. The length of the fleece is increased, with all its valuable properties retained. The Romney Marsh wool is a very rich, soft, good handling wool, finer iu quality than the Leicester, with all the glossy and lustrous appearance of the Lincoln. Cheviot wool is largely used in the manufacture of worsted ; it is of medium length and fine fibre. Woollen goods, broad cloth, fancy cloths, &c., are manufactured from the Bhort staple Southdown, Shropshire Downs, &c. Merino and Southdown is a short, fine, close-growing wool, and in much demand. The Shropshire Down is growing rapidly into importance, and has of late years received much attention of breeders ; its wool is long in staple and very lusti ous ; it might be cultivated ip many of the colonies with great advantage, and give a valuable cross with merinos. The merino is perhaps the most important and widely dispersed of any breed of sheep ; the unequalled fineness of the fibre and the felting properties of its wool have given it great importance. The merinos adapt themselves to all climates, and, with proper care, retain the valuable properties of their fleece as well amid the mountain snows as under the tropical sun. By careful management and care in crossing with English breeds great results are achieved by the merino. DAGGING. This is the name given in some localities to trimmig sheep about the hind partß, legs, and belly, in the spring, or before the shearing commences!. A very useful table or trough is shows for this purpose, and will bo found very convenient. Place the sheep upon its back in the hollow of the trough, feet upwards, in which position it will struggle very little, when a good hand with the shears will very rapidly trim away dung, matted locks, and stained portions of the fleece. PREPARING WOOL FOR SALE. Spread the fleece with the shorn side down upon a clean floor or table, taking care that there are no straws, dung, litter, &c., about to get mixed up with the wool ; remove from the fleece all dung and stained locks, turn the sides over to the centre, leaving the fleece about 12in or 16in wide, depending upon the size of the fleece ; roll lightly up, s j that it looks light and fluffy, tie with a broad band of wool string; do not use thin twine nor hay-bands, as they spoil the fleece. A band should be round the two ends and the middle and another across. Never pufc.stained locks and floor sweepings inside, they reduce the value of the whole ; the locks may be washed and sold separately. —Quibell’s Guide. ARTIFICIAL MANURING. The more general use in this colony, during the last few years, of artificial, and particularly phosphatic, manure, might lead to the belief that farmers are beginning to realise the faot that, in some form or another, the ingredients extracted from the soil in the course of cultivation must by some means be restored, or a general deterioration will result. Suoh an opinion, however, would probably be entirely erroneous. It is true that in Otago and Canterbury, and, more: recently, in parts of the North Island, the use of artificial manure for root cropß is frequently resorted to, but it does not by any means follow that farmers adopt this course with any other object in view than that of securing the certainty of a turnip crop, or that the science of agriculture is better understood by the farming community generally, than it was a - dozen or twenty years ago. We have, on a former occasion, referred to the fact in this Journal that Baron Von Liebig, the father of agricultural soienoe, was the first to formulate the principles which govern the process of growth and reproduction in Nature’s vast laboratory, the soil, and the air we breathe. Although, previous to his researches into the chemistry of plants and the soil from which they are produced, the experience and observation of generations of farmers had shown that in every part of the globe where agriculture is carried on, in all varieties of soil, and with every kind of plant, and varying mode ; of cultivation, the produce of a field on whioh similar, or dissimilar, kinds of plants have been cultivated during a series of years, decreases in quantity and quality, and that it 3 fertility is restored by the application of farmyard or other natural manures, no definite conception existed as to the relation between the mineral and organic constituents of the soil, and the crops that were produced from it. Guided by experience, which is tho basis of all inductive science; Liebig and other distinguished chemists who shared his labours, clearly showed that the fertility of a field, the elementary composition and peculiar properties of a plant, and the various organisms which are nourished and sustained by the plont and vegetable food contained iu the soils, are each the result of

something which can be accurately measured and weighed, and which, under the searching ordeal of chemical analysis, may ho resolved into its constituent elements. Iu short, for the first time the fact stood plainly revealed that the fitness of our fields for producing grain, roots, dairy or other produce, bears a direct proportion to certain elements con tained in the soil, which are absorbed by the plants, and that the partial or entire removal of some of these elements renders the reproduction of the plants, to the growth of which they are found to be essential, a matter of the greatest difficulty, and, ultimately, an absolute impossibility. Chemistry further showed that two fields of unequal fertility contain these elements in unequal quantities, in fact that the fertility of a soil is partly dependent upon the relative proportions of its constituent elements ; and this generalization furnished the stepping stone to the conclusion that the only true scientific basis of agriculture is the proper regulation of the supply of those mineral elements which are essential to the organic growth of the plants which the farmer intends to produce, and which are taken up and removed by the plants each time that a crop is harvested. Theoretically, this seems a very simple matter, but iu practice it is found to be very different, the difficulty being of a two-fo d character. In the first place it was found that it is not sufficient that the mineral cansfitu* tils of plants arc present in the soil, Mir. it is a!»*i cs-ential that they shaH he combined in tim muat proportion requisite 10 produce the maximum dearer* of fertility, tt is this that renders f.umy>ud manure, when obtainable in sufficient quantity, tho he-1 possible fertilizer for the general purposes of f.grioultDin this case the nitrogen and too phosphates b"*r a definite relation to one another, wind is a'po ' correlated to the elementary composition of the plants removed from the soil and con. sumed by .the stock on the firm ; the i<n portant fact of this ecuno to n being that the ammonia ot the manure is ;i!--iy.-i accompanied by the mineral elements which affect its nourishing qualities, because they render its assimilation into the organism of the plant, and its transition into a nitrogenous constituent, possible, .Another, and still greater difficulty, exists in the fact, which agricultural chemistry has clearly proved, that most of the mineral constituents of the soil are so mutually dependent upon one another that the proper combination of all may be arrested or prevented, owing to the total absence, or presence in insufficient quantity, of one particular element. Thus an application of lime is often necessary to ronse the dormant energy of certain soils, otherwise well supplied with tho ingredients necessary to fertility, whilst, on the other hand, by the sams principle we can understand why the frequent liming of land tends to produce exhaustion ; for if the effect of this substance be to convert the dormant ingredients of tho soil into active ones, or to render their principles, which from their combination, were soluble only in a slight degree, more immediately available for the use of the plant, it is evident that every fresh application tends to diminish the amount of these ingredients, not only by what is actually taken up by the plants hut otherwise by what is gradually carried away by the rains" that percolate the soil. By too liberal a supply of lime, therefore, we defeat a wise provision of nature, which counteracts the great solubility of the alkalies by retain, ing them in a state of combination with other earths, from which they are slowly liberated; thus anticipating the. ingenious experiment of an illnstraipus chemist who, in order to prevent the alkaline ingredients of his manure from being carried off before the (jj-op had had time to taks them up, combined them with carbonate of lime, and thus produced a less easily soluble combination. Professor Daubeny, writing upon this subject some forty vears ago, pointed out that one of the most formidable consequences of the omission of this natural provision for econo, mising the resources of the soil, would have been that, long before the present stage of the world's history, all the alkalies existing in the superficial strata of the earth must have bean carried down to the ocean, and that, except for a tract along the sea coast which would have been manured by the algai thus stimulated into excessive growth, the whole of our continents must have become absolutely barren, owing to the difficulty of conveying inland the marine vegetation, which alone could have returned to"the land those soluble ingredients which the rains of previous ages had washed away. Under the wise provision of the Creator these consequences are prevented by the state of combination in which the alkalies naturally exist in the soil, as they are thns brought into solution so sparingly that the whole, or nearly the whole of them present in the water which the soil retains is taken up by plants, whilst the latter, as they decay, render those elements back again to the soil in a condition available for further use for the purposes of plant food. This explains the vast accumulation of alkalies locked up within the forests of thinly peopled countries, and the extraordinary fertility of virgin soil in many parts of the world, enriched, as -n this country on the west coast of both islands, by the annual tribute paid to it by the decay of forest vegetation. It also serves to explain the miasmata so apt to occur in newly occupied country, when land rich in vegetable humu3 is disturbed in the process of agriculture, and the decay of vegetable ddbris accelerated by the introduction of air and moisture.—Farmer’s Co-opera-tive Journal.

HOW TO PUT UP A HYDRAULIC RAM. W. E. THOMAS, MARYLAND. This little machine, where the conditions necessary to its working exist, or can be made even by somo outlay of labour for first cost/is about a 3 perfect for its purpose as cm well be imagined. Any man of ordinary intelligence, who can read and understand plain and extremely simp e directions, can erect one. The principle on which the water-ram works is, utilizing the force which the wa’er attains in running from the head provided through the feedpipe into the ram. This is done by the check valve or plunger being moved upward by the flow of running water

coming from below. This sets the plunger firmly’ in place obstructing the outflow in that direction. In the bottom of the chamber of the ram, over the running water, is a valve that allows the inflow of water, and prevents it- -running back. When the plunger is forced up, the suddenly-checked water finds an outlet through this valve. When this force is expended, which is well nigh instantaneous, the plunger falls back by its weight, and again the water runs through the perforations' provided, for’that purpose, and carries it up again. A large part of the water is thus lost to get the balance when it is wanted; The principle by which the water is forced up is not by compressed air, The duty of the air in the chamber is to act as a buffer. The water working up the supply pipe gradually exhausts this air. This loss is guarded against in some patterns by the use of a pinhole in the feed-pipe, near the chamber, which sucks a little air in at every stroke of the plunger. The first conditions to be observed in putting up a ram is to secure a proper head for the height the water must bo raised, aud tho amount desired. My machine had a fall (the best I could give it) of throe feet eight inches, and raised water to a tank three hundred and fifty-one feet awav, up a hill fifty-two feet above the ram. If there had been a fall twice as great, probably four times as mjich water could have been supplied. The next condition is, a proper outlet co carrj waste water readily ; the last and very necessary condition is to provide a frost-proof covering for the ram and pipes, burying the pipes in soft ground twenty to twenty-four inches, and in packed ground thirty inches. Don’t try to run a very small supply pipe ; the friction is too great. I tried three-eighths-inch, and found it too small. Use galvanized iron or lead pipe, or what is still better, rustless iron pipe. Put up a ram properly I It cannot easily be put in any ether way, so far as the instrument itself is concerned. But make all the little conveniences for hrmso and barn, as they will be wanted. The invention of tho water-run, like other useful applications of Nature’s forces to man’s every-day wants, was by a Frenchman, Montgolfier, who also made the first baloon. American Agriculturist.