Grass Concentrates

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 840, 7 December 1929, Page 33

Grass Concentrates

Science Helping the Farmer

E\ 1 inorn 1 1 now wc liear of some ircslt discovery oi" science in its endeavours to help on the cause of increasing production on the farm. One of the latest spheres of scientific research is that in relation to the conservation of grass pastures in the form of dried cakes. Grass preserved in this form has been proved a highly digestible food, rich in proteins and vitamines, which may inaugurate a new era in the history of grass land husbandry.

During the season 1027 the Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., working in conjunction with the Cambridge (England) School of Agriculture, undertook the cutting over a certain test acreage. The cutting was so regulated that the herbage was always being secured in the young leafy condition. Immediately after cutting, the grass was dried down in steam-heated troughs, and the dried product, was later compressed into the form of cakes by means of hydraulic presses. These dried grass cakes measured Uin by sin by lin, and were of such a density that 40 cubic feet of the compressed material weighed one ton. They had retained the green colour of the fresh grass, and possessed a pleasant, fragrant odour. They contained 8 per cent, of moisture, and 23 per cent, of protein. On being moistened with water, they swelled up considerably and disintegrated. They were consumed eagerly by sheep, bullocks, and dairy cows, both in the dry and in the soaked condidition.

Critical feeding tests were made on these dried grass cukes at Cambridge. From these trials, the following two main conclusions were drawn:—(l) The processes of drying and pressing do not in any way impair the high nutritive properties of the fresh grass; 1 2) such dried grass cakes are able to replace oil cakes with every success in the winter rations of dairy cows and fattening bullocks.

It is therefore permissible to hope that at some future date dried grass rakes of this nature will find their way on to the market, and that they will be employed as a substitute for oil cakes in the winter rations of farm animals. Whether this hope will be fulfilled in the near or in the distant future will depend on the progress which is made in devising suitable appliances for drying down young yrass. Work on this engineering problem is being actively prosecuted at the present time. Dried grass cake constitutes an almost ideal concentrated food for farm ■stock. It Is highly digestible, and rich in digestible protein. Since grass is the natural food of herbivora, the protein of grass cake should eminently be suited to the requirements of farm animals. Unlike most oil cakes, dried grass cake is rich in bone

and milk-forming minerals, like lime, potash, and phosphate. With the exception ot milk, nc

feeding stuff on the farm 5s better balanced in respect of minerals than is pasture grass. It should further be kept in mind that dried grass cake is rich in vitamins. Recent research has demonstrated that winter milk is liable to be seriously deficient in vitamins, but that this is not the case when the rations of the cows contain feeding stuffs rich in vitamins. The richness of grass cake in respect of green pigments should serve to maintain the colour of winter milk and of butter. Enough has been said, then, to justify the figurative assertion that pasture grass conservation implies a twelve Instead of a five months’ pasture season. Thinking Imperially, grass conservation would confer an incalculable boon on droughty parts of the Empire like Australia, where during bad seasons the herbage shrivels away to nothing, and hundreds of thousands of sheep die off miserably. The application of scientific methods to the study of grassland problems during recent years has led to discoveries which have astonished farmer and scientist alike, and which bid fair to inaugurate a new era in the long history of grassland husbandry. Grass is shown to be at once our oldest and our newest farm feeding stuff.