THE FARMER AT HOME.

Otago Witness, Issue 3854, 24 January 1928, Page 12

THE FARMER AT HOME.

Our caption will perhaps arrest attention, as farmers in New Zealand, in common with other parts of the Empire, are perturbed at the meagreness of their incomings compared with the increased expenses due to high land virtues and costs of production. Our farmers may well wonder how their confreres in the Homeland are faring in these days of readjustment. The call for more production is a sane one, provided the methods adopted are on modern or scientific lines. Better crops as a result of adequate tillage, fertilising with manures calculated to assist any particular crop, liming where the drainage is satisfactory, and the grazing and fattening of stock with due regard to

feeding conditions at once come to the mind as means to that end. Then, too, the class of stock on the holding must be considered, and due regard given to the character of cpvering of the sheep and the animal’s conformation, the ability of the dairy cow to yield a flow of milk well above the average herd, and generally to attend to the breeding, feeding, and care of beef cattle. Agriculture is passing through a period of acute depression at Home, due to monetary *uses, relatively low prices of cereals and other produce, the Argentine meat war, and bad harvests. Lord Bledisloe, the Parliamentary Secretary to the English Ministry of Agriculture, considers that such periods of depression or adversity may bring good in the' end by stimulating the resourcefulness of the individual farmer and the research activities of the scientist. He quotes the eighteenth century parallel of Turnip Townsend Coke of Norfolk, whose enterprise in hard times initiated the four-course rotation of crops that is now recognised as the sound policy in arable farming. At the present time we are, he said, witnessing a revolution in the - introduction of sugar beet crop into England, in milk recording and similar systems designed to secure increased yields, and in dairy ranching as exemplified by Mr Arthur Hosier’s farm on the Wiltshire Downs. But most important of all is the new - intensive system of grassland management by the generous use of nitrogenous fertilisers, coupled with close grazing of live stock. This, Lord Bledisloe believes, is destined to be the great landmark in the agricultural history of the twentieth century, and to alter farm practice and to increase farm products as substantially as did the introduction into England of turnips and clover in the eighteenth century. It will, he said, be in the future gratefully associated with the names of Dr Warmbold, of Hohenheim (Germany), and with those of Caroil, Keeble, Brunton, and others in the Old Country. Grassland, we may remark, forms twothirds of the farming laud in .England and Wales, apart from rough grazings, but more than half of this is unfarmed, unmanaged, unfertilised, and often undrained. It was Dean Swift who described the man " who could make two cars of corn or two blades of grass grow where only one grew before” as “doing more essential service to his- country than the whole race of politicians piit 4- together. This, taking the long, view, is no exaggeration. It. is the noble Lord’s opinion that farmers in the Home Country have concentrated far too long on the ears of corn and forgotten or neglected the blades of grass, although admitting that live stock are now and always will be the backbone and sheet-anchor of British farming. He said, inter alia, that the most profound mistake that was made on the Home front during the war was the “ wheat obsession ” —the policy of treating cereals as the foundation of our food supply in a great emergency, rather than rapidly and universally reproduceable products like potatoes and pigs, the production of which in Germany enabled that country to continue the war for at leqst a year longer than she could otherwise .have done. This “ cereal obsession ”

must now be abandoned in Great Britain if agricultural prosperity and the nation’s agricultural policy are to be re-established on firm foundations. It is already demonstrable both in Germany and in England that on an area where formerly one cow could be kept in poor condition, intensive grazing on short wellfertilised grass will enable three to be kept in good condition, and the grazing season to be greatly prolonged, with almost incredible financial advantage to the stock owner.

The fact that nitrogen (produced synthetically from the air) is becoming a cheap fertiliser, and is destined to become still cheaper in the future, will enable this process to be tried out by the farmer who has sufficient vision and intelligence to adopt himself to methods, new no doubt, but proved of value in other countries. It would appear from recent experiments that the supposed deterioration of herbage from the frequent application of' nitrogenous manures is a fallacy, provided always that a sufficient balance is maintained of the other requisites of fertilisation—namely, phosphates, lime, and (on the lighter soils) potash.