32 



summer and winter feeding where the old type of winter fee(iing^ 

 for pasture fattening prevails. 



It is said that a Lancastershire English pasture will make five 

 hundred pounds of growth in a season per acre. Here it will take 

 ten- fold this area on the average pasture. We cannot afford to 

 farm on this level with large areas of our holdings practically idle. 

 Pasture lands must be put to work and to good work. Where this 

 is done there will come with it a great widening of our business. 



How Can it be Done? 

 The common advice to cut the bushes and weeds is correct so 

 far as it goes, but it only treats the effect of the disease and not 

 its cause. At best, the process can only enlarge the area of poor 

 soil that is available and let the sun in on the shaded grass to 

 sweeten it. This work of restricting pastures to grass, as against 

 bushes and weeds, must be done as an initial step. When the soil 

 is handled for grass, and the bushes cut a few times in August and 

 the weeds kept back, grass will gain a hold and retain it. The 

 persistent recommendation to seed pastures anew and work the 

 seed in is a temporizing expedient. Seed is not fertility nor can 

 it replace it, and though successfully started will not long hold the 

 soil, as against the grass to which the soil has become adapted for 

 reasons already noted. The thoughtless advice to burn over the 

 pasture in the fall and spring fails to note the burning of the nitro- 

 gen compounds and the wastage into the air, and, however care- 

 fully done, the injury to roots. Some unwanted seeds or annuals 

 may be injured, but the conditions that breed or harbor them are 

 left. Fertility and fertility of the right sort must characterize a 

 good soil. Plants can no more make uniform vigorous growth 

 without abundance of proper food. 



How TO Fertilize. 



Plant food may be applied in yard manure, and if accompanied 

 by new and right seed and with a surface cleared of weeds will 

 give in time a good mat of pasture grass. The process will fall 

 within common knowledge. As all or approximately all New Eng- 

 land farmers are hard taxed to obtain manure enough for their 

 fields, this method may as well be passed by at the present stage 

 of pasture development. 



Grain feeding on pastures, with partial reference to improving 

 them, is an English custom. Sir John B. Lawes has shown by trials 

 that such pastures when turned for staple crops are more produc- 

 tive than those not thus treated. Trials by the writer in Missouri 

 and New Hampshire, and by the experiment stations of Illinois, 



