3SZ SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



ration. Grass silage (and probably dried grass also) is bound eventually 

 to come into its own. Bad grass cannot, however, make good silage or 

 good dried grass, while everything is to extend the season over which 

 it is possible to dry grass and make silage — special purpose leys can help 

 enormously to this end. 



My particular criticisms of permanent grass, considered as grass, are 

 these. Even the best permanent grass is far too weedy and much more 

 weedy than first-class leys, and the best permanent grass has a shorter 

 growing season than can be arranged for by a sequence of good leys. 

 Exceedingly productive leys can be maintained on soils incapable of 

 holding and incapable of being made to hold good permanent grass. 



I want first to say a little about weediness, and this will lead naturally 

 to the considerations around which the strongest case for ley-farming 

 on grounds of pure husbandry is to be made. 



Weediness makes for uneven grazing — witness, for example, the effect 

 of buttercups ; it therefore makes for a waste of valuable material ; it 

 also makes for an uneven spread of urine which cannot be mechanically 

 rectified. Because of this, and for another reason now to be explained, 

 weediness or any tuftedness in a pasture reacts against the enhancement 

 of soil fertility, as well as causing the waste of edible material. 



My ' other reason ' is that herbage returned to the soil through the 

 animal, provided the lime and phosphate status of the soil is maintained 

 at a proper level, leads to greater soil enrichment and productivity than 

 when such herbage is allowed to rot back, a fact which has been shown 

 by numerous experiments conducted at Aberystwyth,^ and which tends 

 to add emphasis to the teaching of our own and other experiments, as, 

 for example, those of Mr. Martin Jones, on the profound influence of 

 night paddocking and of any even slight robbing of Peter to pay Paul. 

 These experiments, coupled with observations over a great number of 

 years, particularly striking phenomena now presenting themselves on 

 the lands where we are conducting our Cahn Hill experiments, force the 

 conclusion upon me that urine has a virtue greater than is fully appreciated, 

 and a virtue that reveals itself on land no matter how generously manured 

 with what have come to be regarded as standard dressings of CaPKN. 

 Consequently any system of grassland management, or for that matter 

 of farming, that does not make the best use of what Mr. Bruce Levy of 

 New Zealand has so aptly, but possibly one-sidedly, described as stock 

 nitrogen, is open to grave criticism. 



Because of weediness, tuftedness and uneven grazing, and of herbage 

 never converted, and because of night paddock and quasi-night paddock 

 effects, stock nitrogen is wasted, or uneconomically distributed, to a far 

 greater extent on permanent grass than on leys ; it is so wasted, and 

 often to an exaggerated extent, on even the best fatting pastures, and 

 particularly so when watering arrangements are ill arranged. The 

 matter, however, goes much further ; the fertility accumulating under 

 the best grassland (permanent grass and leys alike) becomes in excess 

 of what can be cashed from the grass-clover covering. All very old ■ 



^ Experiments now in progress at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station, and see 

 R. G. Stapledon, ' The Improvement of Grassland,' Journal of the Bath and West 

 and Southern Counties Society, 1937-38. 



