Gorse. 
381 
as well as at two. With moderate attention to its culture, and by 
keeping it from being injured by sheep and cattle, it will produce, 
if it be cut every year, at the rate of from 8 to 14 tons per acre, 
of good succulent provender ; if it be cut every second year, it 
will yield at the rate of from 12 to 24 tons per acre. 
It is difficult to estimate the benefits which a few acres, in pro- 
portion to the size of the farm, under this crop, and where the 
land is thinnest and poorest, would confer upon the farmer. 
Taking into consideration the relative value of land required, 
and the difference in the expense of tillage, the gorse crop might 
be as important an item in the farmer's balance-sheet as a crop 
of turnips. 
It is not however intended, by challenging this comparison, to 
inculcate a notion that the nursing of gorse should supersede the 
culture of turnips and of other green crops. Quite the contrary. 
The object is to show that an immense extra quantity of green 
succulent provender, as a cheap and valuable substitute for hay, 
may be always secured — and that independently of dry seasons — 
at what is really a trifling expense, and from lands that, as to their 
present produce, are absolutely of no value. This fact is very 
clearly exemplified in localities in which some attention has been 
paid to the cultivation of gorse. 
Instances have occurred of farmers having been known to pay 
at the rate of 15/., 20/., 30/., aye, 40/. per acre for gorse, to those 
who had bestowed some little care in the cultivation of it, and that 
upon land immediately contiguous to that which they themselves 
occupied (App. 4). Scores of acres of the land so held, though 
capable, with the slightest attention, of yielding luxuriant crops 
of gorse, are suffered to be of no value. Nay, such farmers allow 
whole districts to remain unproductive. Their own grass crops, 
from want of activity and forethought, are almost worthless ; and 
they purchase in the immediate neighbourhood, at a high rate, of 
more intelligent and industrious individuals, that very provender 
in the form of gorse which land in their own hands, if judiciously 
managed, is capable of furnishing in abundance, and in return 
for the most trifling outlay. 
The correctness of this observation will not be questioned by a 
single unbiassed agriculturist who is familiar with the counties 
of Carnarvon, Anglesey, and Denbigh. No practical man, who 
takes an interest in agricultural concerns, can pass through these 
counties without being struck in some localities with the extra- 
ordinary luxuriance which the gorse crops present on banks and 
cuttings adjoining to public roads, and upon ditch-banks, fence- 
mounds, declivities, and steep side-lands, as well as in all other 
places where that plant had been sown, and where it had been 
assiduously nursed and protected. 
2 D 2 
