OIAP. ix. MANAGEMENT OF GRAZING STOCK. 159 



the trader, his stock, his customers, and his bills. These and others, 

 many and many, have their own peculiar cares and perplexities ; but 

 none are greater in number or in proportionate importance than those 

 cares, anxieties, and perplexities daily experienced by farmers and 

 stock-owners. Every animal is an object of individual and of especial 

 daily care, every crop and every kind of crop is an especial object of 

 intense interest, as upon the success attending the one or the other the 

 farmer thrives or fails. 



" The profitable grazing of his stock, then, is to him a matter of 

 paramount importance, and great are his anxieties as to the best mode 

 of carrying out this department of his business. Much will depend 

 upon the character of the soil and pasturage with which he has to do. 

 The occupiers of land of the first class lands qualified to fatten readily 

 the finest oxen have a plain course to pursue. Theirs it will be to 

 depasture with cattle of a high order ; to put cattle in high condition, 

 and requiring no great length of time, on good pastures, to prepare 

 them for the butcher, and to bring them quickly up to the first quality 

 of meat. The next order of lands would be the prime sheep-pastures. 

 These cannot be put to better purpose than in depasturing sheep of 

 good age and condition, and the quantity of mutton and wool produced 

 per acre goes well-nigh to exceed in profit the somewhat superior 

 bullock-lands. Be that as it may, each variety of land is best to be 

 kept to its order of grazing ' bullocks ' to bullock lands, ' sheep ' to 

 sheep lands. 



" The great difficulty that graziers have to contend with, is to make 

 the most profit of the intermediate lands, and rotation seeds and 

 clovers. Speaking generally, these had better be appropriated to 

 breeding purposes, dairying, and the grazing of young stock. Most of 

 the ' sweet lands ' in the Midland and other counties are well adapted 

 for dairying uses, and nothing can pay better where conveniences 

 accord. The produce of the dairy and the rearing of the young cattle 

 are doubly remunerative, though there are exceptions ; the majority of 

 common grazing lands are adapted for dairying ; or if some of the 

 most fertile of these second-class lands are appropriated to fattening 

 uses, it should be in conjunction with artificial aids. Cattle and sheep 

 on such lands will fatten satisfactorily if liberally supplied with linseed- 

 cake from four to six pounds for a bullock, and from half-a-pound to 

 a pound for a sheep, depending much upon the size and weight respec- 

 tively." 



Independently of remedying the inconveniences above specified, a 

 variety of circumstances combine to prove that the practice of soiling, 

 or feeding cattle during the summer with different green and succulent 

 vegetables that are cut and carried to them in the sheds and of box 

 and stall-feeding them in the winter season with dry fodder, in conjunc- 

 tion with various nutritive roots will in general prove most economical. 

 The terms " soiling " and " stall-feeding " are in one sense synonymous, 

 as in both of the systems the leading feature is the housing of the cattle. 

 The term " house-feeding " is therefore used by some writers ; but in- 

 asmuch as there is actually a distinction between the kind of food used 



