426 FEEDING ANIMALS. 



clover, vetches, rye, oats and peas, peas alone, the different 

 varieties of millet, and many other green crops. The clover, 

 vetches, rye, oats, peas, millet, etc., may be fed over several 

 times in a season ; as, if fed off when a few inches high, 

 each of these crops will spring up again, on good land, like 

 pasture grasses. This point is worthy of close considera- 

 tion in feeding for the renovation of worn-out lands in the 

 Eastern States ; for some of these crops may be raised upon 

 most lands, and thus furnish green pasturage for sheep; 

 and if fed off within hurdles, in a manner to confine the 

 sheep upon small spaces, the extra grain food will produce 

 an immediate result in improving the second or future 

 growth of the green crop. These portable hurdles are 

 easily moved, and the sheep may be passed on to fresh 

 ground each day, not allowing them to eat the green crop 

 too, close. In this way the land may be made to furnish the 

 green food for summer, to be cropped off the ground, saving 

 all labor of feeding, except that of moving the hurdles, 

 and distributing a certain quantity of linseed meal, corn or 

 other gram in troughs, daily, for each sheep. This labor 

 could not exceed one-half hour per day for fifty sheep. Let 

 us now consider the crops that may be fed off green by 

 sheep. 



WINTEB EYE. 



A crop of winter rye would succeed for this purpose prob- 

 ably better than most other crops, and might be fed off, 

 successively, for the whole season, and then furnish pasture, 

 or mature a crop, the second season. It does better for pas- 

 turing than cutting for soiling, for which it is often used ; 

 because in pasturing it will be kept cropped off too low for 

 the seed panicle to start, and thus keep up a constant 

 growth, whilst in soiling it is seldom cut before some of the 

 seed-heads are formed, and these plants will not grow again, 

 and, therefore, the second cutting will be small, compared 

 to the first. Rye furnishes a good pasturing crop, also ; 



