NEW ZEALAND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 291, 8 December 1928, Page 22 (Supplement)

NEW ZEALAND

THE GREEN GRASS CARPET A VISITOR’S IMPRESSIONS Tn an article entitled “Forty Thousand Hills and a Grass Carpet,” which appeared in “The Country Gentleman” (one of the leading journals published in the United States), Mr E. V. WiJcox gives his impressions of a recent visit to New Zealand. The following are some interesting extracts from his article:— It’s the green grass carpet (writes Mr Wilcox) that w ill linger in my mind as the chief memory of New Zealand. No other country has 90 per cent, of its cultivated land in permanent pasture. Try to picture to yourself 16,000,000 acres of lawn. Then remember that it’s a veritable established religion to keep this lawn bright green and closely cropped by sheep and cows 365 days of the year. Think of New Zealand farms, not as a series of cultivated fields planted in various crops, but as perfect lawns or golf courses dotted with sheep and dairy cows. Don’t forget either that this continuous green-felted grass carpet extends over hill and d. le, through level valleys, by roadsides, along stream banks, across the landscape in all directions, on volcanic slopes so steep that I fully expected the live •stock to slip off. Bear in mind, too, that N.ew Zealand as a white man’s country is only 85 years old. But I get no impression of newnes s in the farming districts. On the contrary, I find myself labouring under the feeling that it must have taken ages of effort to product such marvellous pastures. Some of the gras s carpet is 60 years old, most of it is over 20 years old. Such ideal pasture land gives the appearance of age. End of Long Trail. Add to this impression the fact that 11,000,000 acres of ;his grass rug was wrested from forest jungles by lumbering, burning, clearing, seeding and fertilising. . . . How much land can be brought into the grass carpet class in that way? About 6.000,000 acres are now grazed by dairy cows, and fully 10,006,000 acres by sheep. I talked with one enthusiast who thought that the dairy lawn might be doubled in ten years. . . It’s milk that makes the. world go round in New Zealand; cow’s milk for butter ami cheese, and sheep’s milk for lambs. And the secret i.s found in spreading the grass carpet as far as it will go, and keeping it green the yfear round by close grazing. How is it done? Let us look first at the sheep runs. Just at the end of the winter season I travelled through a series of hills covered with at least 50,000 acre s of continuous lawn, bright green anil in .active growth, with the grass at a uniform height of two inches. And not a weed in sight, unless the English daisy may be called a weed. The sheep pastures are speckled with it here and there up to the highest foothills. But the thing which amazed me was that such a large area could be kept short like a perfect putting green, with no tufts of tall grass. On the hills cattle are used as mowing ; marliines to rut down the tall grass, : ami thus stimulate fresh growths. The i cattle clean the range, removing the lough, coarse stuff, leaving smooth lawns of fresh g-ass fur the sheep. Supplementary Feed. Are the dairy and sheep industries, however, really operated on lawn grass alone without any supplementary feeds except the grass silage and hay cut expressly to maintain the farm in a lawn condition? Not entirely so. In the Taranaki district 1 mistook the first turnip field 1 saw for boulders, so gigantic were these roots, all being .eight io twelve inches in diameter. New Zealand grows about 450,000 acres of turnips, and they must contribute substantially to the production of Canterbury Jamb and Fern.leaf butter and cheese, the three products of which every New Zealander i.s proud. . . More than 50 per cent, of the dairy cow s in the Dominion are milked by machines. With 17,000 milking plants in operation, about 60,000 cows may be milked simultaneously. In other words, it requires only ; bout an hour and a half night and morning to milk New | Zealand’s 800,000 cows. . . Business Efficiency i My first and last impression of New Zealand dairying, however, concerns the efficiency with which the business is operated. On land costing up to £4O an acre, butter i.s produced at perhaps two-thirds the cost of that in Wisconsin ami Minnesota. To my mind, this proves two things: the high value qf short, vigorously growing grass for milk production, and the skill of the New Zealand milk producers. They are high-grade fellows, I can testify to that, with attractive homes supplied with radios, telephones and jelectric light. They know the virtues of co-op-eration, 75 per cent, of the dairy business of the Dominion being co-opera-tively organised. Production has doubled in the past decade. New Zealand i s rapidly overtaking Denmark on the London markets. If you ask the New Zealand farmer about the productive capacity of his cows his answer is never in pounds of milk, but always in pounds of butterfat. Thai’s what he sells. The rest goes to the pigs or is thrown away. In 1910 the average New Zealand cow yielded 1401 b. of butterfat. To-day her average is 1801 b., and there are at least 500 herds which i.v.erage 3001 b. Herd testing. I was told, is the cause of this increase. Cheaply Operated Around one co-operative plant I found that over 60,000 cows are annually under test. And in that district j the farni s are so well organised that one man is adequate for all the work connected with 20 cows, while two men can handle 50 and three men 100 cows. I doubt if there are many ,100-cow farms in the United States where three men can do all the work. In short, the year-round pasture lawn system is not only efficient, but cheaply operated. To my mind nothing else explains how

the New Zeaaludcrs make money dairy ing on such high-priced land. . .

Back in the ’forties the early settlers came to New Zealand to dig gold out of the ground. By the modern alchemy of agriculture their descendants to-day are transmuting grass into gold without exhausting the mine.