PERMANENT PASTURES. gg 



PERMANENT PASTURES AND THEIR MAIN- 

 TENANCE. 



By H. L. Leland, Sangerville. 



The raising and feeding of stock in its several branches, is 

 the basis of profitable farming in Maine. The essential factor 

 in profitable stock husbandry is a plentiful supply of grass, 

 a generous growth in the field to cut, cure and store for 

 winter food, and in the pasture an equall}^ abundant yield of 

 sweet, nutritious feed for the sustenance and growth of the 

 animals grazing there. The average farmers of Maine receive 

 more net income from summer pasturage — in the growth of 

 young animals, in dairy products, in beef and mutton — than 

 from any other source ; and yet the pastures are the most 

 neglected and sadly abused portion of the farm. 



The term "permanent pasture," in Piscataquis county, is 

 understood to apply only to lands inaccessible to the plow. 

 Lands so completely paved with stone, that the sheep grazing 

 them need to have their noses sharpened to get at the feed 

 growing in the crevices; wet lands, not quite wet enough to 

 be profitably used for the production of dainty tit-bits for 

 the elite of Parisian life, yet wet enough to be resonant with 

 music or croaking in early spring, and still dry enough in 

 midsummer to grow rushes and coarse water grasses, to rasp 

 out the throats, and fill the bellies of the hungry animals 

 compelled to graze them. In addition to these wet, broken 

 and rocky lands, it may also include large areas of naturally 

 fertile and easily tilled soils. These soils have, from a series 

 of years of cropping, with no return of fertilizers, been 

 robbed of their vitality till they would no longer pay the cost 

 of cultivation, and are now turned out to the renovating 

 agencies of nature and neglect, and used as ranging ground 



