ROTATIONS 387 



their occupiers, and some of these, we are told, were 

 wholly left down in grass because the owner had 

 been rendered short of working capital by his purchase. 

 Rents stood at about 303. an acre for the land under 

 cultivation, but to the farm we were visiting was 

 attached rent-free a considerable area of salt marsh at 

 a lower elevation, awash at every tide, but still carrying 

 a dense vegetation of reeds and salt grass. The usual 

 rotation followed is an eight-year shift of oats, beans 

 and potatoes, wheat, turnips, barley, seeds which are 

 hayed in their first year, and then grazed for two 

 years longer. The main difficulty is to get a satis- 

 factory turnip crop, and the Carse farmer is often 

 compelled to take a bare fallow over a considerable 

 proportion of the turnip land. Finger-and-toe is 

 fortunately absent ; the difficulty lies in getting a 

 proper seed-bed on the comparatively stiff and wet 

 land. Lime is valuable on this land, as it greatly 

 improves the tilth. On the farm we were visiting the 

 rotation was extended to ten years by taking a bare 

 fallow after the wheat and following it with a second 

 wheat crop before sowing the turnips. The farmyard 

 manure is applied to the turnips and potatoes, both 

 of which also receive 4 cwt. to 5 cwt. of artificial 

 manure ; but no other fertilizer is employed, except 

 occasionally some nitrate of soda on the grass. 



All the Carse farms we saw were carrying very 

 heavy grain crops, and cutting was just beginning in 

 the first week of September; as very little of the corn 

 was laid or damaged in any way, and a month of 

 almost uniformly fine weather succeeded, the farmers 

 in this district had every reason to be pleased with 

 their year's working. Good as 1911 was, 1912 turned 

 out even a better year ; prices were higher all round, 

 and turnips and grass were just as abundant as they 



