156 EXPERIMENTS UPON GRASS LAND 



Speaking generally, these plots now present the appearance, 

 perhaps in a rather exaggerated degree, of much of the poor 

 pasture and meadow land in this country, wherever milch cows 

 and wet flocks are habitually grazed and the land occasionally 

 hayed, without anything being restored in the shape of artificial 

 food or manure. Fig. 17 shows a photograph of a piece of turf 

 taken from this plot at the end of June 1903. 



The great value of occasional dressings of farmyard manure 

 to grass land may be seen in the returns from Plot 2, which 

 for the first eight years of the experiment received farmyard 

 manure at the rate of 14 tons per acre. The application was 

 then discontinued, but the effect has persisted to the present 

 day, i.e., for fifty years. 



Table LX. shows the produce on this as compared with 



TABLE LX. Produce of Hay per acre, first and second crops, showing 

 residual effect of Dung. Eothamsted. 



the unmanured plot for the preliminary period for which the 

 dung was used, for the two years following its discontinuance, 

 and for five ten-year periods 1866-1915. Although the yield 

 on this plot remains at a higher level than where the land has 

 been continuously unmanured, yet the plot now shows great 

 impoverishment in the character of its herbage, having about 



