The Express.
London, England, 1847-12-28 00:00:00

THE MORE CATTLE-THE MORE CORN.

The Gardeners' Chronicle says :—The experience of
agriculturists is uniform upon a point of the first importance,
which was thus referred to by M. Dezeimeris, in • past
number of the "Transactions of the French Academy of
Sciences :"—" Everywhere and elwaps the produce of a farm
is proportional to the quantity of manure produced upon it,
and therefore to the extent of it which is set apart for the
food of stock, compared to that of the portion which is occu-
pied
by exhausting crops."—" For one well-cultivated dis-
trict in the country are there not 20 where the farming is
miserable ; and yet what is required to remodel and perfect
that of the wont 1 Just one thing—so simple it seems: let
the farmer devote to the cultivation of food for his stack at
least one half of his oecn^:.;„n." angiish tsPerie,'"'
mere
pOtecily 'Dean out that U. ranee. The more stock a man
Is able to keep upon his farm the mere coon also is he able
to grow.
Mr. Lewes has thrown moat haatructive light around this
result in his valuable paper on agricultural chemistry, pub-
lashed in the last number of the English Agricultural Society.
He has beautifully explained the proportion which new-
sully exists between the quantity of meat made and the
quantity of corn grown. Perham the prevailing idea of his
paper—one, too, to which he has been led by the results of
many experiments—is the great importance of ammonia in
a manure. The amount of this ingredient to which the crop
has access (the other elements of its food being present, as
they more generally are, in sufficient quantity) determines
the maximum of its produce. It is all true that nature
flourishes under a merely natural supply of this substance,
but the very idea of art is an improvement of nature, and
artificial supplies of ammonia, in addition to the natural, are
necessary whenever the farmer desires to reap more that
a merely natural produce. The effect of the ammonia thus
supplied appears from the results of the analyses which Mr.
Lewes quotes to be simply the development of the crop in
its characteristic features : it makes green trope more luau-
' runt; the starchy seeds of a grain crop more starchy ; the
nitrogenous seeds of leguminous crops more nits ogenous.
It does not necessarily increase the nitrogen in • !plant, be-
cause itself is • nitrogenous substance—but it develops the
characteristic features of the plant, because it is a nounshing
food.
Now, this ammoaia may be applied directly in its various
salts in guano, &c., but not often economically. Mr. Lewes'
experiments show that in order to procure the increase of 1
bushel of wheee'containine as that does but 11b. of nitrogen,
ninny pounds of nitngen n3nit added to • the
A large portion goes to waste, as one would expect,
and the remainder, which is useful, is often too
small a portion of the whole to balance the loss.
The cheapest mode of collecting and applying ammonia is
by means of the turnip crop, from the au. And it is on the
fact that in the feeding of animals but a small portion of the
nitrogen in the food becomes built up in the substance of the
flesh that the merits of turnip husbandry as an instrument
in the growth of wheat depend. Most of the nitrogen in the
food appears in the manure; 28Ibe. of flesh contain 11b. of
nitrogen ; but an average of experiments has taught that it
takes food containing elbeof nitrogen to create that quantity
of meat, so that the remaining 51bs. are returned to the moil.
And now let us quote a passage exhibiting the bearing of all
this on the point with which we started :
" In my experiments upon wheat it required 51bs. of am-
monia to produce • bushel of corn. To obtain this amount
of AMILIOTIA by means of stock there should be an increase
of about 28 lbs. of live weight upon the farm ; or, is
round numbers, to obtain one ton of grain beyond the
natural production of the soil there ought to be an in.
crease in the weight of stock of 1,000 lbs. In order
to bring an exhausted soil to the highest state of fertility, It
will be necessary to produce an amount of meat by means of
imported food (such as hay and oil-cake), u will be equiva-
lent to the increase of grain required. As the green trope
increase year by year the same amount of meat will be pro.
&teed, but the importation of artificial food will gradually
decrease to the point at which the internal and external is-
sources of the farm are an balanced as to secure the largest
amount of produce from the soil."
For every I,ooolbs. of flesh, then, grown upon a farm, the
weight of grain also grown may, it would thus appear, be in-
creued 2,400 Ile. above the natural production—namely,
above the quantity which the natural supply of ammonia
would enable the sod to produce.
Our object is rather to induce the perusal of Mr. Lewes'
valuable article than to furnish our readers with a full state-
ment of its content", and therefore we must for the present
conclude. It is a matter of the fleet importance that the
principle, which is believed to exist, be fully nnderstood for
the guidance of practical agriculture :
" That the amount of meat or light weight of stock pro-
duced upon • farm should bear a fixed relation to the quan-
tity of cum exported."
If, as Mr. Lewes says: " Tho truth of this postulate be one
established, and the proper proportions fixed, it will no longer
be necessary to enforce upon the farmer any particular rotation
of crops. So long as a due relation between his production ,
of meat and export of corn were maintained, there would '
be no fear of an exhaustion of the sell, even if ha grows no
green crops whatever; and he might safely be left to make
his own choice of the means he would adopt. His object
being the production of a certain amount of meat at the
lowest possible expense, he would naturally devote hie
energies to the production of large green crops, in order to
limit his outlay m artificial food. Knowing, too, the most
profitable conditions upon which his corn could be raised,
his chief attention would be paid to the economical supply
of food for his stock, in full confidence as to the consequeneu
of his course."