116 
The Practical Value of Bung 
of loss, almost every farmer found tliat in tlie unusually wet 
season of 1879 the dunged crops appeared to suffer as much as 
where artificials were used. Nor were the crops much better 
after any kind of manuring than where nothing was applied. 
Practically, however, there is an enormous loss of manurial 
matter from dung before it reaches the field. There is not one 
farm out of fifty provided with boxes or covered yards to protect 
the dung from being wasted by washing. In too many instances 
I have not the slightest doubt that much more than half of the 
most valuable ingredients of the dung are washed away and 
utterly lost, so fixr at least as the producer is concerned. 
Compensation clauses for estimating the unexhausted value 
of cattle-food in manure must be liable to many considera- 
tions before any proper estimate could be made of what might 
be supposed to be left in the land years after the supposed 
rich dung was applied. It might be possible enough for 
20 tons of oil-cake to be consumed annually on a farm, by 
dairy, young stock, or even fattening cattle, and that, by the 
manner of wasting the manure in open yards, not lOL worth 
of the original manui-ial constituents of 20 tons of cake might 
be left for the field. In a general way, with large open 
yards, it is a mere waste of money to purchase dear food with 
the double object of producing meat and rich dung at the same 
time. As a rule, therefore, the ordinary farmer looks mainly to 
the cost of producing meat at the smallest cost for purchased 
food, without any particular calculation about the maybe hidden 
value of the dung. Although rather poor, clean land is much 
to be preferred for entering upon than very foul land which has 
a charge against it for unexhausted manures. The unexhausted 
value of manures is altogether a most intricate subject. 
The field at Woburn where the experiments have been carried 
out had no doubt a good deal of unexhausted manurial matter 
left in it when the experiments commenced. I remember nearly 
fifty years ago that the land was heavily dunged with rich fat- 
tening cattle manure for swedes and mangolds. The crops 
were heavier about that time than they liave been of late. It 
was the system then to consume one half the root-crop on the 
land by sheep. The sheep were liberally fed with oil-cake, 
corn, and hay or clover chaff. The first crop of the com'se had 
a heavy dunging. The second crop, barley, was too rank, and 
fell down long before harvest. To consume a quantity of the 
produce on the land, and to supplement this by cake, corn, &C., 
tended, as a matter of course, to produce heavy crops. This 
was the system pursued for a long time on the Woburn Park 
Farm. There need scarcely be any doubt that the dung pro- 
duced by fattening cattle at Woburn fifty years ago cost about 
