SHEEP AS SOIL IMPROVERS.

Colonist, Volume LVI, Issue 13420, 18 March 1914, Page 8

SHEEP AS SOIL IMPROVERS.

Discussing the value of sheep as soil improvers in a paper contributed to the "Livo Stock Journal Almanac," Professor Wrightson, an English authority, has the following:—

"The profit, or rather the advantage, of sheep cannot be reduced to a each statement. There is the benefit accruing from the ewe flock itself, /but there is also that of the close folding of ewes and lambs. It is impossible to reduce these items to a monetary standard. Still, if anyone will consider what hie sheep are doing for him in respect to his whole system of cropping he will find something like the following rough estimate to approximate the facts. With the aid of sheep poor land which could not produce more than 20 bushels of wheat per acre may yield nearer 40. Similarly the barley crop will bo increased from 24 to 48 bushels ; the oat crop up to about 66, while hay and all the root crops will be incomparably bett6r. It would be a mistake to attempt to reduce these gains to figures. They are best arrived at by thinking the matter out and fixing reasonable figures to represent what each farmer thinks his sheep do for him when folded on his land It is sufficient to show how inextricably the flock is entwined with the interests of the farm. It is at once a land-presser, a lawn mower, a fertiliser, and a manure distributor in one — trimming rough herbage that no cutter could reach, levelling pasture in spring, and preparing for ploughing in autumn —acting as a scavenger of waste herbage all the summer, and gathering up the fragments and hollow shells of swedes and turnips all the winter. A flock makes «hort work of clover, dodder, and at once proceeds to demolish many flowering weeds. It may be used to firm land for young wheat, and to check the exuberant growth of wintei-proud grain crops."