into Permanent Pasture, and the best Method of doing it. 493 
quite in a different position to the ordinary occupier of arable 
land who by one or two corn crops may draw out of the land 
the extra condition he has put into it. Not so the occupier of 
young turf, if his only security for the repayment of any portion 
of his outlay is the power to break up the land again, and 
thus partly destroy his own improvements without benefiting 
himself. The occupation of a farm of the nature I have described 
is not attractive to a man of capital and enterprise unless the 
terms be easy and he has confidence in the permanence of his 
holding. 
Mr. C. S. Read, at a recent meeting of the London Farmers' 
Club, said that " his advice to a farmer about to take a heavy- 
land arable farm out of condition was, ' Don't ; ' " and that " the 
natural solution of the problem was that a good deal of such 
land ought to go to grass." In the absence of a tenant able and 
willing to carry out the work thoroughly it will be in some 
cases necessary for the owner to take it in hand for two or three 
years, to clean and seed the land with well-selected perma- 
nent seeds, to top-dress with bones or other suitable manures, 
and then to let it to the best tenant procurable on such terms 
as to encourage if not to compel liberal top-dressing or cake- 
feeding, and of course to prohibit the breaking up again of the 
turf. 
Where help and encouragement are needed, it may in some 
cases be good policy for the landlord to pay to the tenant 1/. or 
21. per ton for decorticated cotton cake consumed on the land, 
on production of satisfactory vouchers. The manurial value of 
this food is placed by our leading agricultural chemists at from 
5Z. to 6Z. per ton, being higher than that of any other cattle-food ; 
and although this value is theoretical and doubtless in practice 
liable to large deductions, a very large consumption of this 
cake leads me to attach a high value to its manurial properties. 
Generally speaking, the most economical means of improving 
pasture-land is by the judicious use of this and similar foods 
rich in nitrogen. 
Many farmers never use decorticated cotton-cake, and are 
Ignorant of its value. If by the payment of a small tonnage 
landlords can induce tenants to begin its use, the money will 
often be well spent, as the value of cake-feeding once experienced, 
the practice of using it will not be wholly relinquished. 
In order to describe a little more in detail the actual process 
of seeding down land, I will state what has been done by my 
father and myself on my own holding, within the last thirty-five 
years, within which period 100 acres have been permanently 
seeded. The climate here is cool and better suited to grass 
than corn, and many of the fields are stiff clay and hilly, thus 
VOL. XV.— S. S. 2 K 
