Post date: Mar 16, 2021 4:59:57 PM

Extract from Field - Saturday 08 October 1881

THE FARM.

STOCK FEEDING AND FRUIT GROWING.

THE OCCASION of a visit to the late Mr Leney, of Wateringbury, Kent, in the middle of the garden of England, I learnt a useful lesson in fruit growing. Mr Leney was the owner of a very valuable herd of about about a hundred shorthorns, and number of his great cows were grazing in a cherry orchard. Most of the fruit trees in that district are of large size; the cherry trees at Wateringbury are timber trees but although the subsoil of Kentish rag, suited as it is to fruit trees, had fed them up to an unusual size, the fertility of the surface had been exhausted by long cropping and indifferent farming, and the cherries been, during several years, an unprofitable crop. In order that this fruit may sell well in London, it must be a good bold sample; the cherries must be large and handsome in appearance. Those of Wateringbury, on the contrary, had become small and lean and poor. "When I hired the farm," said Mr Leney, " the cherry trees were mere encumbrance, and there was some thought of cutting them down but I felt sure that in feeding the pasture for the sake of the cattle we should improve the cherries."

Farmers out of Kent are not great fruit growers; few would think of wasting manure upon their orchards. They might do worse. Mr Leney's cherries been worthless before they were manured, but after grazing the turf underneath with highly fed shorthorns for a year or two, they produced first-rate fruit, the value of which would have bought the ground. Fruit trees remember cost nothing for labour in unproductive years, and in good years good sorts, in competition with imported fruit, pay well. A predecessor of my own had planted several acres of apples and pears, which I found in a starved and neglected state. The winter succeeding the Wateringbury visit, I manured them, and the following summer I cake-fed the grass. The crops were greatly improved and the fruit enlarged, and my orchards brought good returns, but not so good as they would have done if the sorts had been better and district more favourable. Good sorts and a good soil are essentials, in successful fruit growing, and as both these conditions can be secured in the southern parts of the country, there is no reason why English apples should play the small part in the market that they do at present.

I was reminded of the common neglect of fruit growing and of Mr Leney's management by the statistics supplied in the of the largest dealer in American apples in Liverpool, Messrs. Green and Whitney. According to these well-informed authorities, and quoting their circular,

The season just passed seen the largest receipt of appies from the United States and Canada into this port that has ever been known, and the grand total from all parts amounts to 864,075 barrels. against 290,223 barrels the last season, and 333,649 barrels the season before but notwithstanding the enormously quantities, our market has at all times been in a condition to take everything that has landed in good order, at fair prices. Good fruit has always been saleable and in fair demand, and the result of the season has established the fact that, with fair stock selling at 11 to 12 shillings ($2.75 to $3), the demand is so great as to be practically without limit. The English crop of apples plays now a very small part in the apple trade, the demand being entirely for American fruit.

These gentlemen are importers of fresh fruit. But, besides fresh apples we receive from America a very large quantity of tinned apples and of dried fruit, " apple chips." There can be no doubt some of these imports , in the absence of customs duties, could be kept out by our own skill and industry in supplanting them with native produce.

I have shown that the production of apples or cherries "goes well" with grazing. I believe I saw at Wateringbury the most valuable herd of beef-producing shorthorns that ever fed together in a cherry orchard before, besides a first-rate crop of cherries brought to profit and perfection by the cattle grazing. "In this connection," as the Americans would say, the National Live Stock Journal of Chicago has treated of stock feeding and fruit culture as kindred industries, assisting each other. They go well together, because fruit-growing exhausts the ground, while stock-feeding restores it at the least possible expense, restoring it, so to speak, incidentally, and with the expenditure of a small amount in labour. The larger fruits, such as apples, pears, plums, and cherries, are best grown as they are in Kent, with turf beneath them. Tillage is injurious to the larger fruit trees, by interfering with their surface roots. Depasturing, on the contrary, manures the land at the surface, where experience shows that fruit trees should be liberally fed, the surface roots elaborating healthy sap in conjunotion with air and warmth. It is evident, however, that large crops of fruit must drain the soil of its fertility, and therefore an orchard to be profitable must be well fed: and it cannot he fertilised more readily and economically than by the grazing of cake fed cattle.

Orchards may be pastured with great advantage by young neat stock, or by calves and yearlings, and a sprinkling of sheep; and as both calves and sheep are fond of apples, they will pick up all the windfalls which have ripened early from being worm-eaten, and in dung they will destroy the grubs before their escape into the earth, and clear the orchard of injurious pests. Old orchards, which bad become sterile from poverty and the depredations of Corculio, have been thoroughly renovated and restored after three years' depasturing by well fed calves. Our Chicago authority states that one large apple grower who markets many thousand barrels a year, and & pastures calves, sheep, and pigs in different orchards, finds that the increased quality and quantity of fruit much more than pays the cost of food, and he secures at the same time a large profit on the stock. This then must be good stroke of business as at which a French agriculturist elaborated in an article headed "Manure and Milk for nothing." His secret was cows, whose manure was to pay for the milk, and the milk for the manure. The American "apple raiser" is not quite so sanguine; still he claims a profit. His plan is ten calves for a ten-acre apple orchard in young turf, not yet yielding much grass; and he gives each animal one quart oats and two quarts of middlings daily from June 1, and sells them in October at a net profit of 15 guineas, or £1. 11s.6d. each. That is pretty well when you don't pay rent. My repeating to English agriculturists a bit of American stock management may remind them of the vulgar proverb about teaching one's grandmother! It is for the sake of the apple-growing only I have mentioned the experience, and I will therefore add that the calves picked up all the wormy fruit as fast as it fell and grew like hops while the crop lasted.