GRASSLAND RESEARCH

Taranaki Daily News, 26 October 1935, Page 24 (Supplement)

GRASSLAND RESEARCH

EXPERIMENTS AT ROTHAMSTED. FERTILISER TRIALS IN BRITAIN. The report of the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 1934 describes certain grassland experiments newly undertaken in Britain. The work on basic slag conducted under the aegis of the Basic Slag Committee of the Ministry of Agriculture was greatly extended in 1934 by the inclusion of experiments to test the new medium soluble slags produced by the steel manufacturers. These slags are not necessarily mixtures of high and low soluble slag; some of them contain new compounds recognisable by their crystals. During 1934 a series of trials'was conducted on swedes in Scotland by local workers in conjunction with Professor McArthur and. Rothamsted. In these experiments low soluble slags gave much better results than had been obtained in the earlier grassland experiments in England; but in all cases the effectiveness of the slag increased regularly with increasing solubility by the citric acid test. Medium soluble slags were intermediate between high and low soluble slags, but the experiments must continue for some years before their value can be properly The quality of green fodder crops has been for some time under preliminary investigations, and now that the barley investigations have been transferred it will be further studied. The chemical work Is being based on the fact that- a green fodder plant passes through two stages in its life history; in the first stage it is assimilating nitrogen and mineral matter from the soil, and is consequently rich in protein equivalent and minerals; in the second stage it is elaborating carbohydrates, sugar, starch, cellulose, lignin, etc, and is consequently rich in starch equivalent and fibre. The work promises important practical application in several directions, including animal nutrition; Studies of . “crude fibre” have shown its relation to the cell wall constituents. It is recognised, however, that chemical investigations alone will not satisfactorily deal with quality of fodder crops, since biochemistry is not yet sufficiently advane'ed to give complete indications of the feeding quality of the various crops. > Methods have therefore been developed for using pigs for this purpose, adopting weight, grade, and bacon factory reports, as the criteria. The work is. now reaching a stage where plant nutrition begins to approach animal ■-nutrition,. and it will shortly be necessary to. invite the co-operation of investigators in animal nutrition..