144 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Nothing is better settled than that the grass-crop needs a 

 variety of plant-food to enable it to reach a perfect develop- 

 ment. A mixed top-dressing, consisting of nitrogen, phos-, 

 phoric acid, and potash, is a far more economical application 

 than any one substance, unless it be good farmyard-manure, 

 which contains all these ingredients in reasonably suitable 

 proportions. A compost of these essential constituents is 

 now easily obtained. The nitrogen is cheaply obtained in the 

 form of nitrate of soda or Chili saltpetre, guano or muriate of 

 ammonia ; the phosphoric acid in bones or pure bone-meal ; 

 the potash from pure ashes, or more readily from kainit, or 

 some high grade of the German potash salts. These three 

 indispensable ingredients are used, I believe, in Professor 

 Stockbridge's formula for grass. 



There is probably no man whose opinion is worth more 

 on questions relating to scientific or progressive agriculture 

 than Mr. Lawes, whose elaborate experiments at Rothamsted, 

 in England, are well known to every intelligent farmer. He 

 was recently applied to by a gentleman who had a lot of old 

 run-out pasture-land that sadly needed renovation, to know 

 what he should use ; and his reply was, Put li cwt. of nitrate 

 of soda, 2^ cwt. of superphosphate, and 3 cwt. of kainit per 

 acre. How those proportions differ from the Stockbridge 

 Fertilizer for grass, I will not undertake to say ; but the lead- 

 ing constituents of the compost are essentially the same, and 

 they constitute a most excellent mixture. 



To make the most of our pastures, we ought, I think, to 

 resort to a more extended use of artificial fertilizers, taking 

 greater care to see that they are what they are represented to 

 be, and to supplement the pasture-feed with extra feeding of 

 cattle while at grass, either in the shape of linseed or cotton- 

 seed meal, or, what is about as good, perhaps, Indian meal or 

 middlings. By this artificial aid we are enabled to carry more 

 stock, and to keep the pasture constantly improving, instead 

 of running down. 



The mistake has often been made by those who were ambi- 

 tious to do something for their pastures and other grass-lands, 



— something, perhaps, out of the common run of farm practice, 



— of applying only one substance. A farmer thinks, from all 

 he can learn, that his pasture wants phosphates ; and he makes 

 up his mind that ground bone or bone-meal is just the thing. 



