LEY FARMING

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21180, 29 October 1938, Page 15

LEY FARMING

ROTATIONAL GRAZING LONG TERM POLICY “Ley-farming and a long-term agricultural policy” was the subject of Professor R. G. Stapledon’s presidential address in the Section of Agriculture during the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge. Profesor Stapledon is Professor of Agriculture Botany at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and director of the Welsh Plant Breeding Station, and his subject had to do, as he put it, with the most honourable, and what should be the most venerated, aspect of the whole of agriculture —the rotation. A ley in agricultural parlance is a field sown down to grass and/or clovers designed to take a definite place in a rotation, and destined to be periodically ploughed up. The ley-farmer, he said, must be a proficient stock-master and a proficient cultivator, versed alike in the arts of animal and crop husbandry. Agricultural thought in recent decades, he submitted, had turned ever more exclusively towards the’narrow, too narrow, as he thought, path of commodities, each considered as such. Excessive concentration on commodities led inevitably towards monoculture, and to what we were too lightly pleased to call specialisation, and led away from the rotation and ultimately to disaster.

Greatly daring, he had set himself to combat this modem fetish that had revealed itself not only in the trends of agricultural science but in a very great deal of what the State had endeavoured to achieve for agriculture. In the precarious state of the world to-day there could be only one approach to the problems of agriculture, and that was the national approach. We must not so much consider what was good for the State; then what was good for the State must be made good for the farmer.

Meeting an Emergency

The success of a long-term agricultural policy must be judged in the main by the sureness and rapidity with which all the farmers of the country, in order to meet any emergency, proved themselves able to pass from the production of another, or radically to alter the proportions of the several commodities produced. It appeared to him, Professor Stapledon said, that the present needs of the State, and also the more menacing of the foreseeable contingencies, united to demand one and the same essential contribution from our agriculture. It was not for him to attempt to decide whether war danger or the danger of about-rapidly-to-dwindle population was the greater peril; little less disconcerting were the effects of soil erosion and soil depletion in those countries from which we were wont to obtain abundant and cheap supplies of food. He was concerned with the kind of policy which would take at least ten years to put into full operation. He believed the extent of the influences of soil erosion and depletion were not even yet fully realised. Our own rough and hill grazings had manifestly deteriorated, witness the spread of bracken. They had become increasingly depleted of lime and phosphates in recent decades, and the same thing must be happening to a greater or lesser extent—sometimes accompanied by actual erosion—in all the great ranching areas of the world. Rural Population What was demanded of cur agriculture, he added, was, first, to maintain as large a rural population as possible, for probably on a large and contented rural population depended to a marked degree the increase of our population as a whole; secondly, to maintain as large an acreage as possible in a highlyfertile and always ploughable condition; and, thirdly, so to conduct our farming as to allow at all times, and in all places, for the absolute maximum of flexibility in commodity production. In a review of present conditions, Professor Stapledon said that leys, so long as they continued to be managed as such, were almost invariably managed better than permanent grass. He advocated a four-year-ley, ending with at least two years of honest hard grazing. Ley-farming, he said in conclusion, afforded in his view great scope for a reorientation of such working capital as the farming community possessed, and of the monetary and other arrangements existing between landlord and tenant.