Management of Grass Land. 
169 
independent of season, as should the weather be drought}' and 
his stock heavy, he can at any time lighten his pastures by 
draughting a few forward beasts for sale. 
Another advantage which arises from giving artificial food to 
grazing cattle, is that the pastures themselves are gradually im- 
proved, until land that is only fit for rearing store cattle becomes 
capable of fattening stock with a moderate amount of help 
towards the end of the season. 
Hitherto I have spoken of good land only, but unfortunately 
the larger portion of the pasture land of the United Kingdom 
may be classed either as moderate or inferior. I will not attempt 
to describe the various gradations by which land descends from 
the highest quality to that which requires some acres to keep 
a yearling steer, and which was once described by a dis- 
heartened occupier, as of that kind on which the grass only 
began to grow on Midsummer Eve, and gave up growing on 
Midsummer Day. The various shades of land worth from 405. 
per acre downwards require very similar measures for their im- 
provement, and, before making any special suggestions respecting 
ihem, it is necessary to declare open war against the time- 
honoured fallacies that pasture land can be profitably occupied 
by leaving it to itself, and that a farmer consults his own 
interests by allowing the arable land to rob the grass. Any one 
who mows his grass without return robs his land quickly, and 
he who pastures it without return robs it slowly ; but the process 
is sure as well as slow, and when persevered in long enough 
produces the splendid variety of thistles, ragwort, scabious, and 
other flowering weeds, very charming to a botanist in July, but 
extremely disheartening to the hungry cattle, who are doomed to 
wander amongst them seeking for grass. 
Since the days of Jethro Tull, there have been two recognized 
methods of keeping up the fertility of land, viz., either manuring 
at sht)rt intervals, or thorough disintegration, produced by fre- 
quent stirrings of the soil. It cannot be too strongly urged that 
as grass land is necessarily deprived of the advantage received 
by arable land from frequent exposure to the atmosphere, it 
ought to be furnished in some other way with the minerals 
required to produce good crop's of nutritive herbage. The 
use of artificial manures has given the grass-land farmer com- 
plete command over the supply of nitrogen, but a perfect 
restoration of the mineral ingredients removed by grazing, and 
still more by mowing, cannot be effected without an occasional 
application of farmyard manure or of compost, in which farmyard 
manure holds an important part ; so that it would really be better 
practice, so far as farmyard dung is concerned, to let the grass 
starve the arable land, than the arable land starve the grass, since 
