156 



EXPERIMENTS UPON GRASS LAND 



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 forty years. 



Table LX. shows the produce on this as compared with 



Table LX. — Produce of Ray per acre, first and second crops, shoiving 

 residual effect of Dniuj. Bothamsted. 



the unmanm^ed plot for the preliminary period for which the 

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

 for three ten-year and one five-year periods afterwards, and for 

 the season 1901. Although the yield on this plot remains at a 

 higher level than where the land has been continuously un- 

 manured, yet the plot now shows great impoverishment in the 

 character of its herbage, having about the same proportion of 



