The Farm Prize Competition of 1890. 
813 
up on the form, and succeeded his father as tenant 24 years ago. 
Since that period he lias converted a material portion of the 
land into orchards and fruit gardens, and has developed a trade 
or traffic in the growth and sale of fruit, which has been 
profitable to himself and beneficial to the district at large. 
If, in this report, prominence is given to Mr. Lawry's fruit 
farming, to the curtailing of the record of his other management, 
the reader must not assume that the latter has few points 
worthy of record, but rather that the former is in the writer's 
opinion of so much more absorbing interest as to demand all 
his available space. Fruit farming, and its application to 
small holdings, has of late been such a fruitful subject of 
discussion that a record of its successful practice cannot fail to 
be of more public interest than a mere reiteration of the best 
of ordinary farm management. 
Briefly then, the arable land this year is cropped as follows, 
viz. : wheat 4 acres, oats o£, barley 6, mangel 2, and other 
root crops 1«, the remainder being in seeds of various duration. 
The land is clean, and well managed, and is made to produce 
heavy crops of corn and roots. No finer crops of mangel or 
turnips were seen anywhere than here, and one crop of white 
turnips deserves especial mention because of its being the 
second crop on the land during the year. The field was sown 
in the autumn of 1888 with winter oats, which were harvested 
about the middle of August 1889, then dunged, ploughed, and 
sown with common turnips, and a right good crop resulted. 
The mangel crop was estimated to weigh upwards of forty 
tons per acre, and was little short of that grown the previous 
year, for which a second prize had been awarded in a local 
competition. Mr. Lawry attributes the weight and success of his 
crop to the fact of the plants being left thicker on the ground 
than usual, because of the rows being only nineteen inches 
apart and the plants singled out to ten inches. The excess 
in the number of roots at these distances over those at 2 ft. by 
10 in. is 7,500 per acre. All the green crop land (except that 
for mangel) is sown with either trifolium or vetches, and the 
produce made into silage in a silo which is fitted with an 
apparatus of Mr. Lawry's own invention, for lifting the heavy 
stones used for weighting. 
All the dung produced on the farm is applied to the arable 
land, and is supplemented by bones, guano, and nitrate of soda. 
The expenditure in purchased artificial manures and feeding 
stuffs averages 2-jOL, in addition to some hundred tous (weight) 
of town mauure, which is brought from Plymouth by barge to a 
wharf on the river boundary. This latter manure is applied to 
