SHEEP IN CALIFORNIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 1340, 4 August 1877, Page 18

SHEEP IN CALIFORNIA.

From various portions of the State come reports of great suffering and loss among the flocks, and even yet the new grass is not sufficient to keep in good condition all the flocks that depend on wild range for subsistence. One man in Monterey county lost on an average 25 head a day for several weeks, and has hardly one of this year's lambs left. In Kern county the Bheep industry has been greatly depressed, and we hear of ene sale of 600 head of sheep and 300 lambs at 600 dots, for the lot, and that on time. The present system of sheep-raising is wrong and must be supplemented by an entirely different -one. Wool-growing is and always will be a profitable industry when rightly managed; but the day is past when any considerable number of sheep can be supported on the outside pasture* of the country. Before the interior counties were surveyed, "men could hold thousands of acres for sheep ranges under the infamous possessory law ; but since the lines have been run the sheep-walks have been gradually invaded |by the cultivator of the soil, until there is not much good pasture land left.

The day, is not far distant when the greasy, wrinkled Merino and the native Spanish sheep will give place to the more

profitable and larger-bodied Cotswold and Southdown, and instead of the large flocks now roaming and starving on the barren plains, every farm will have a few, and the better feed and shelter which can be thus afforded will serve to produce a better quality of wool, and place it on a par with Canada and Eastern States wool. One acre of alfalfa will support more sheep than twenty acres of wild pasture, the wool is of better quality, the increase is greater, the losses of lambs lighter, and the general profits greater.— San Francisco Chronicle.