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AGRICULTURE.

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AGRICULTURE. (No. 8.) LIME AND BONES. TENANT farmers, liable on short notices to be turned out of their holdings, or, what they dread perhaps still more, to have their rents x-aised, are not likely to expand much capital in bones and lime. This fact is so obvious that Welsh landuwners cannot be ignorant of it, and yet they per- sistently decline to make twenty-one year leases the rule instead of the exception. A yearly tenant who limed and bone-manured his land liberally; who drained wet places, and kept watercourses, ditches, and drains well open; who cut and repaired fences and kept up gates who made roads through his farm, and main- tained his house and buildings in good repair who procured good machinery and saved manual labour by erecting a water wheel, windmill, or turbine who grew turnips and mangels; who fattened stock, and sent his children to first- class schools a yearly tenant who acted in this way would be looked upon as a lunatic by the public, and would very soon be told by his land- lord that his rent was too low by half. When he had spent say £10 or C15 an acre on the land he would be removed, or his rent would be raised equal perhaps to ten per cent. on the amount he had expended of his own capital. There are landlords-but they are scarce—who would neither evict an improving tenant nor raise his rent, but a good business man engaged in agriculture can- not invest his capital without the security afforded by a long lease. Farming, without lime and bones, is very much like the children of Israel's brickmakii) g without straw-thankless labour. The only thing required to complete the tenant's hope- less condition is that his homestead should be erected, as thousands of homesteads in Wales are erected, on the side of a hill, and that the fertilizing qualities should be washed out of the farmyard manure into blocked drains! The results will be disease in his household, much labour in carting the ruined manure upon his fields, and scant crops. The loss of manure entailed by the position of the farmyard of course cannot be attributed to the farmer nor, in the present state of education in Wales, can ho be severely blamed for his indifference to that loss, and his neglect to minimize it. The average Welsh farmer at once understands the loss of a dead sheep or of a sovereign m money, but he fails altogether to realize the far greater loss of rain-drenched manure, bad seed, or underfed cattle. It cannot be expected that a tenant who does not zealously guard his farmyard manure from deterioration will be the first to recognize the need for careful treatment of lime and the desirability 04 liberal expenditure in bones. Indeed the agriculturist whose education has been I neglected can only with great difficulty be made to understand that the material for the supply of crops must be regularly put into the soil or the time will come when that material will be exhausted and the land will become valueless. Lime is scarce and dear in many parts of Wales, but the wasteful treatment to which it is subjected might induce a stranger to think it was obtained free of cost. The process of slaking is C) often left to the rain, and the lime is then not used until it. has lost most of its caustic qualities. A paragraph on this subject from Professor TANNER'S useful little work needs to be enforced on Welsh farmers with all the emphasis that can be commanded. There are two methods," says the author referred to, by which caustic lime is slaked. One of these is a bad and wasteful system, and the other is a good and economical plaa. It is a too common practice for lime which has been drawn for manure to be distributed over the land in small heaps and left there until the rain has slaked it. This not only leads to much delay, but as the slaking takes place gradually, much of the lime has been acted upon by the carbonic acid of the atmosphere, aud much of its power lost before it is brought into use. Compare with this the care taken by a mason when slaking lime for mortar no delay is allowed, it is done qnickly by adding sufficient water, and then it is heaped up and covered from the air by sand. Some farmers adopt the same plan, and as soon as the heaps are made iu the field a water cart carries round the water required for the proper slaking of the lime, and it is then heaped up and protected from the air by a covering of erth. For building pur- poses it is necessary to slake the lime thoroughly j and without loss, aad it is equally so for use as a manure. The only difference is that the loss is more easily detected in the case of the builder, but it is equally a loss to the farmer wbether he knows it or not. Time is, after all, an expensive manure before It is got upon the land, and it is unwise to allow it to waste." On the side-land farms of Wales lime is a far more expensive manure than on the level tracts of England, but the tenants of those side-land farms who carefully study how to make the most of the lime they pur- chase are certainly a small minority. Instead of covering up the slaked lime, and afterwards liar-1 rowing it into the laud before its power has been abstracted by the atmosphere, the custom is to leave it on the fields until the weather has made it almost useless. That poor farmers should purchase lime, drag it laboriously up steep .fields, and then fail to make the best pos- sibla use of it, is one of those extraordinary facts which can only be explained by the cultivator's ignorance of the properties and uses of the article he is dealing with. Lime, for obvious reasons, is far more generally used in Wales than bones. The yearly tenant knows that lime will assist him in getting out of the land, for a time at any rate, more than he puts into it. He will make the soil hungrier in the long run, but if landlords prefer yearly tenants and a certain territorial power, rather than leases and improving estates, the tenant must accommodate himself to the con- ditions of his position, and must study how to get crops without permanently improving his holding. Half-inch bones are a costly manure that lasts, and consequently one that yearly tenants seldom use anywhere, and still more seldom in Wales. In some parts of the Principality not only are bones not put upon the land, but they are care- fully collected and sent away into England to be manufactured into manures, which do not find their way back again. The custom in Wales of I sending away store stock which has hardly done growing is one that makes the greatest drain upon the land with the least return in the shape of manure. The bones sent away every year in the skins of animals are an item too often lost sight of by farmers who are slow to believe that Wales is as capable of improvement as the once bleak region north of the Tweed. There are towns in this part of the United Kingdom from which many tons of old bones are sent away every year instead of being ground and administered to the land. It does not require a practical farmer of great experience to under- stand that Wales is not in a position to send away bones in large quantities without feeling their loss. It may be said that more than an equivalent for the bones sent away is returned in lime, superphosphates, andothermanures. It is,however, greatly to be feared that this is not the case except in rare instances. There are, of oourse, intelli- gent landowners, leaseholders, and freeholders, who deal generously with the soil, and who have found that it requites generosity with profitable crops, but the bulk of cultivators are yearly tenants, who risk nothing and reap nothing. They I would not be justified in risking anything under a system of tenure that not only leaves them at I the mercy of the landlord but makes them the victims of accidents which happen with sufficient regularity to prevent any reasonable man from calculating on their non-occurrence. The 0 waste of farmyard manure, the mismanagement of quick lime, and the exportation of bones in one form or another are points well deserving the attention of farmers and landowners in every part of the Principality. If the soil of Wales is^less kindly than that of England and Scotland, Welsh farmers should be more and not less careful to utilize every artificial aid for its improvement. If the English farmer finds it necessary 0:1 rich soil to husband his farmyard manure, to carefully slake and apply lime, to import bones, and to assiduously till the ground, then the Welsh farmer surely cannot afford to dispense with these things on poor land which has been neglected for generations. It is true that Wales is not hke Kent or Norfolk, but Wales can be indefinitely improved by the mere application to agriculture of those ordinary business principles, without which nothing can be done in trade or commerce. i If the soil of Wales is not naturally rich, the way to improve it is not to waste manure and. to let things drift, but to grapple with the conditions of the case, and study what is most likely to succeed. There are disabilities, but there are also .advan- tages, and it is absurd to think that with security for the investment of capital, and freedom from game, the tenant farmers of Wales could not put upon the country a different face than that it now wears. One great drawback to agriculture in Wales is due to the impression in the minds ot tenants that good farming docs not piy. There is in every district at least one or more enter- prizing men who take the lead in cultivation, but their neighbours, instead of following their ex- ample, look upon them as dangerous people, whose evil courses are only to be studied to be shunned. ——-—<-————-

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