THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



237 



ture ; and they also found that great stress was laid by agri- 

 culturists upon growing the largest possible roots. This he 

 was inclined to think a great mistake. He had just read 

 a very able paper by Dr. Wolf, the principal of an agricultural 

 college in Germany, in which he stated that on their experi- 

 mental farm, there had been a piece of newly broken-up laud 

 planted with the sugar beet, which was used for the purposes 

 of distillation ; and it had produced a magnificent crop of large, 

 beautiful, and luxuriant roots ; but after they had been grown 

 they had been found to be quite useless, for the sugar manu- 

 facturers would not take them at all. Now, it was a well-known 

 fact that sugar produced fat ; yet it was not that principle in 

 the feedmg materials of roots, or any other thing, but nitrogen, 

 that possessed the greatest feeding valae. Well, as regards 

 nitrogen. Dr. Voelcker had performed a recent experiment on 

 fusty clover hay, and found that it showed more nitrogen when 

 fusty than sweet hay did. No practical man would believe 

 this ; at least they all knew that sweet hay was better than 

 fusty (a laugh) ; they were not all scientific men, but scientific 

 men might meet with practical men at the clubs, and find that 

 they had arrived at conclusions such as these. He trusted his 

 friend Mr. Reader's large roots would not turn out the same 

 as Dr. Wolf's; it would be a bad affair for him after the liberal 

 allowance he had given them, and it was a question whether 

 they ought not to keep to such an amount of roots per square 

 acre as not to produce them of an over large size. They were 

 aware that large roots did not possess that amount of nutri- 

 tion that small roots did. Mangel wurzels of over 10 lbs. 

 weight when cut open were geoerally found to be hollow and 

 insipid. If that were the case it was impossible they could 

 contain the same amount of nutrition. In conclusion he 

 expressed himself pleased and proud to meet them all, and 

 to see the Club flourishing, and he hoped that they would 

 all again have the pleasure of meeting together and learning 

 that the Club derived benefit from its intercommunication 

 with others. 



LANDLORD AND TENANT. 



Mr. T. H. Saunders, in responding to a call made upon 

 him, expressed himself extremely obliged to his excellent 

 friend Mr. Raudall, and to the company. One thing Mr. 

 Randall said with especial truth, and that was, that whenever 

 an experiment had been made by him, he had always given 

 the advantage of it to the club. He had told them in what 

 he had failed, and he believed he had told them too in what 

 he had succeeded. He had been happy and proud to belong 

 to the club ever since it had been established in ISIS, and he 

 hoped that it might continue to flourish for many a year to 

 come. Mr. Bone had alluded to the benefits introduced by 

 the club into the neighbourhood, to which it had been of the 

 greatest advantage ; for if they took the line of hills that be- 

 longed to the district, no man could fancy the extent of that 

 advantage unless he bad previously seen them in their original 

 state. It was not good for a farmers' club if every man in it 

 did not speak out whatever he knew. It did no good to come 

 there and say nothing. Yet a great many members came there 

 and never apoke out at all. Nor was there any good in adhering 

 merely to one side of a question. Agriculture could go much 

 further than it had yet gone. He thought that it might 

 assist the landlord as well as the tenant. Mr. Calcraft had 

 alhided to the propriety of his admission to the club, because 

 Mr. Calcraft was a landowner, and at first sight the club ap 

 peared to be merely a farmers' club ; but what did that mean ? 

 It meant a club devoted to the benefit of agriculture at large — 

 to the benefit of the landlord, the farmer, and the labourer, all 

 of those three interests being bound up in one. They 

 should be happy, therefore, to see the landlord amongst 

 them, if he came to meet the tenantry, and to hear 

 their discussions month after month. The tenant could 

 not go on single-handed ; and if the landlord came in 

 that spirit, they would be happy to see him, that he 

 might see in their discussions what it was that they really 

 required ; but if he came not in that spirit, he ought to be 

 expelled the club. If he came to them as Mr. Calcraft had 

 come that night— let him come. If the landlord and the 

 tenant went hand-in-hand together, England might defy 

 the world. He was happy to see Mr. Calcraft becoming a 

 member of the club, and noped he would continue to be one 

 for some time to come. The advantages of such clubs were 

 too numerous to relate ; but in a few words he had given 

 the heads of his opinion regarding them ; and he hoped that 



he had not said anything that might be disagreeable to any- 

 one on the subject of landlords entering the club. His 

 (Mr, Saunders's) was only one opinion ; everyone had a 

 right to his own opinion. If the landlord came there to 

 see what was wanted, he would find that they wanted only 

 a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, th.at they only wanted 

 interest upon their capital ; but if he did not come, he might 

 think that the results of fanning were double what they 

 really were. He would find that the farmer did not get 

 more money than was his due. Look at the manure bills. 

 Good crops were not all profit : but, if the landlord was 

 willing to spend a shilling, tiie farmer was willing to spend 

 a shilling too. He had omitted to say that he hoped the 

 young members of the club would, more generally than 

 they did, take up subjects and introduce them for dis- 

 cussion, and thus the opportunity would be given to the 

 elder members of setting them right. He thought that in 

 this view of the matter the clubs were good schools for 

 young men. 



MANURING ROOTS. 



Mr. Fowler said he would observe in regard to the 

 subject of their discussion that evening, but witliout at- 

 tempting to detract from the course that had been pursued 

 by Mr. Reader, in using so enormous a quantity of manure 

 for his roots, that he coincided with his friend Mr. Bone. 

 They might draw an inference from what occurred 

 in managing grass lands ; when they placed manure 

 upon grass lands the stock did not thrive so well. 

 On a field of his own, some large swedes were 

 grown on a spot where there had been a dunghill ; and he had 

 been curious to ascertain whether a solid inch cut from these 

 large s'i<edes weighed as much as a solid inch from the ordinary- 

 sized swedes in other parts of the field ? He tried this, and 

 found that the solid inch from the ordinary swede consider- 

 ably outweighed the other : he did not go to grains and 

 miontiae, but the fact was so. He did not wish to raise a dis- 

 cussion on the point of Mr.Reader's largely manuring ; but he 

 agreed with his friend, Mr. Bone, that they might gather some 

 practical information by considering the difference in value 

 betwixt large and ordinary-sized roots. 



Mr. Reader said : With regard to the size of roots alluded 

 to by Mr. Bone, he (Mr. Reader) never meant to compare a 

 large root grown, say in a bog, with a root of the same size 

 grown on strong laud ; for he was convinced that, if they grew 

 large roots on bog-land, they would not prove of equal quality 

 with roots grown on stronger land. But, still, they were not 

 very liable to err in that way. They rather erred, he was 

 afraid, the other way ; and, for one mistake they made ia 

 growing roots large, they made fifteen in growing them too 

 small. The largest he had raised this season had been given 

 to his running store pigs, and that was a pretty good test of 

 their feeding qualities : he assured them that these pigs had 

 had nothing else this fall (Hear, hear), and that the sows in 

 farrow had had nothing but the trimmings of the roots. He 

 was glad to say that there were not a few of them that were 

 not hollow ; in corroboration of which he should refer them to 

 Mr. Watt, who had cut them. A square inch, cut from a 

 root which had grown in a " mixen," was hardly a fairly sample 

 of a field; for it was seldom that they made a "mixen" all 

 over a field. But, no doubt, were they to take a square inch 

 from a root grown on strong land, and another from a root 

 grown on boggy land, they would find the square inch grown 

 on the strong land considerably the heavier. If, however, the 

 error alluded to did occur, it was seldom on the strong land of 

 their hills, where there was acid enough to dissolve the bones, 

 and not a particle remained in a short time ; for the land ate 

 all up, ' 



Mr. Darby, of Lytchett, in an able speech in support of 

 Mr. Bone's view, said that it was better to grow medium-sized 

 than large roots, which, before they were pnlkd, began to 

 decay ; and related an experiment iu which he had succeeded 

 in rendering fusty hay edible by steaming alone, without the 

 aid of salt. 



Mr. Randall took up the point, into which he said 

 the question raised by Mr. Bone resolved itseK : whether 

 turnips had better be sown in 18-inch drills 9 or 10 inches 

 apart, or in 2-feet drills 14 or 15 inches apart ? It was, in 

 his opmion, the 18-inch drill, yielding a moderate-sized 

 turnip, that gave the most crop and the best feed for stock. 



