TRANSACTIONS OF SUB-SECTION K. 703 
4. The Relationship of Manuring to Meat Production. 
By Professor SomrervituE, D.Sc. * 
It has long been known that a large increase of herbage is secured from 
many classes of grass-land through the use of certain artificial manures, but 
in most cases the effects of the manures have been tested by simply weighing 
the increase secured. Sometimes the investigation has been carried further, 
and the herbage grown with and without manure has been separated into 
its constituent plants, and an attempt has been made to estimate the 
improvement in quality by the increase of such plants as clovers, and the 
suppression of such plants as sorrel and other weeds. Supplementary to 
such a botanical separation the herbage has sometimes been submitted to 
chemical analysis, and an attempt has been made to gauge the feeding value 
by the percentage and absolute weight of proteids, fats, and carbohydrates, 
and by the digestibility of the fibre. All these methods convey useful 
information, but as the ultimate object of producing herbage is to feed 
animals, and as no laboratory method can perfectly interpret the processes 
in an animal’s stomach, it occurred to me that useful information might be 
got by utilising the animals themselves to pass judgment on the results. 
My work has been chiefly confined to experiments on grass-land, and on 
grass-land they have been chiefly concerned with pasture as opposed to hay. 
In the United Kingdom there are some 34,000,000 acres under grass (apart 
from mountain grazings), and, of this, 24,000,000 acres are grazed and 
10,000,000 are cut for hay. Clearly, therefore, the grazed area is of much 
more importance than that which is used for hay. To exclude stock from 
plots on a pasture, and to test the results of applying manures by weighing 
and analysing the herbage, must lead to a fallacious conclusion, for the 
reason that the mere exclusion of the stock encourages one set of plants 
and represses another, and the experiment resolves itself into one not on 
pasture, but on hay. 
In 1896 the county of Northumberland rented a farm (Cockle Park) of 
400 acres, of which I was given the scientific direction. A clay-field of 
uniform character, that had been under pasture of a poor type for many 
years, was divided by fences into ten plots of 3 45 acres each. Three acres 
of each plot have been grazed by sheep each summer for the past thirteen 
years, the herbage of the sub-plot of 4 acre being annually made into hay. 
Specially selected sheep have been used for grazing the plots, the animals 
being individually weighed at the beginning of each season, and monthly 
during the progress of each grazing season. The health of the sheep on the 
comparatively limited grazing area of three acres has been all that could 
be desired, and any individual idiosyncrasies have been eliminated by the 
number of sheep (usually six to twelve) that grazed each plot. The system 
of experiment (‘manuring for mutton’) and the results have attracted a 
large amount of attention, and, aided by the Board of Agriculture, the 
experiments have been repeated, in part or in whole, in several parts of 
England and Scotland. It is only necessary here to call attention to the 
leading results, and chiefly to those obtained during the first nine years, 
the scheme being primarily designed to cover that period. 
Lime has been used in two ways: (1) In two dressings of four tons per acre, 
and (2) in three dressings of half a ton per acre as a supplement to superphos- 
phate. The former system is a very old one and popular with farmers, but 
neither at Cockle Park nor elsewhere have the experimnets shown it to be 
efficacious or profitable. At Cockle Park it only accounted for an average 
annual live-weight increase (which, for short, may be called mutton) of 12 Ibs. 
per acre. Under the second method the ton and a half of lime has produced an 
average annual increase of 22 lbs. of mutton, and has left a small profit, as 
against a large loss in the other case. Basic slag, used in the first year only, at 
the rate of 10 ewt. per acre and a cost of 23s. 6d., has produced an average 
