tts Substituies for Turnips. 
279 
sowing as well as when supeqihosphate or kainit is applied as 
manure, the cost is of course added to. Seldom, however, does it 
exceed 25s. per acre, and even when manures are applied is often 
under 11. Naturally, then, wherever there is a reasonable chance 
of obtaining a crop, the risk of loss is so very slight that it 
Avould be folly not to encounter it, especially now that any surplus 
quantity of green crop not required as summer forage for stock 
can be placed in ensilage stacks for conversion into silage. 
Trifolium cannot be grown very far northward, however, and as 
early sowing is all-essential, late harvesting seasons like that of 
1888 naturally cause less breadths to be sown than when the 
corn can be gathered in during August. 
Other catch crops that are autumn sown, such as rye, winter 
oats, vetches, mixtures of some or other of the foregoing, and 
Italian ryegrass, cost more, not only because the land has to be 
ploughed, but from the seed being more expensive. Mr. Henry 
Woods gives the costs of tillage and manuring for winter oats 
at 21. 8s. 5d. per acre. If no manure is applied it would be 
about 11. less. This would also be sufficiently near to be 
allowed to stand for rye ; the seed of vetches, however, would, 
as a rule, cost more than that of rye, bere, or winter oats. 
The value of the produce may, of course, be variously esti- 
mated according to the use made of it. When large flocks have 
to depend almost entirely on it in the early summer months, or 
when urgently wanted for dairy cows, horses, and other stock, 
this can scai'cely be estimated too highly, and there would 
appear to be a further very considerable gain in lightening the 
manurial no less than the tillage costs of the succeeding swede 
or turnip crop. The actual saving may range from 21. to nearly 
double that amount per acre, for whereas some of the Wold and 
chalk-land farmers are able to make 2 cwt. per acre of super- 
phosphate suffice in manuring for swedes after catch crops have 
been fed by sheep on the land, Mr. Treadwell, by feeding off 
vetches with fattening sheep, employs no artificial or any manure 
whatever for swedes. A point of considerable importance, how- 
ever, is as to the amount of gain by growing two crops instead 
of one, when the first is taken entirely off either for conversion 
to silage or for soiling purposes. In such cases the majority of 
farmers would probably bestow 10 tons of farmyard manure per 
acre in addition to superphosphate or bone-manure, and the 
calculation should probably be made on that basis. 
When silage crops have to be grown as substitutes for 
swedes and turnips, which seems particularly desirable on some 
of the stiffer soils, the difference in the return would be very 
much affected by the value placed on the silage itself. 
