226 THE RYEGRASS CROP. 



maturity and furnishes a supply for the first, and perhaps 

 second years, when it dies out and makes room for the 

 perennial grasses, which have then acquired their full de- 

 velopment, and furnish the future supplies. When sown 

 singly as a crop, no tillage treatment is required after the 

 land has been properly prepared and the seed is sown ; all 

 that then remains to be done is to consume it in the most 

 profitable and advantageous manner. 



There is but little doubt that all our forage crops give a 

 much larger available produce when they are carefully cut 

 and carried to the cattle, than when the cattle are turned in 

 to feed them off on the ground, and that a large growth of 

 herbaceous matter can only be supported where a large pro- 

 portion of moisture can be obtained by the plants from the 

 soil and atmosphere in which they grow, or is supplied to 

 them by artificial means. Although these points are gene- 

 rally acknowledged, and although, under the ordinary con- 

 ditions of farming, ryegrass is a very advantageous crop, 

 and furnishes a large amount of early and nutritious keep, 

 whether cut for " soiling" or stocked with sheep in the 

 usual way, we were hardly prepared for those enormous 

 returns which Mr. Dickenson made known to us some 

 fifteen years ago, when he first gave us the results of his 

 mode of treating ryegrass by frequent cuttings, followed 

 by the application of liquid manure. His practice, of 

 which the details were published 1 and fully discussed at 

 the time, was to apply strong ammoniacal manures in a 

 liquid form immediately after each cutting, and by that 

 means he was enabled to render the growth so rapid as to 

 obtain as many as ten cuttings in the course of the year, 

 averaging from 8 to 9 tons each to the acre, or the enor- 

 mous total of fro'm 80 to 90 tons of green produce to the 

 acre. His land for ordinary farming purposes was of a 



1 Roy. Agri. Soc. Jour., vol. vi. p. 576; vol. viii. p. 573. More recent 

 details are given in the Agri. Gaz., 1858, p. 95, and in a pamphlet entitled 

 Instructions for Growing Italian Ryeyrass. Ridgway, 1856. 



