One of the first farming lessons I learned in my north-country boyhood was the value of the ley or temporary pasture in the cropping rotation. In those days it was used mainly to provide first-class seeds hay for winter feeding, and grazing for the sheep. I have since come to regard the ley, properly constituted and intelligently farmed, as the main source of food for both winter and summer for all types of cattle; and, what is more, as the best means of building fertility to supply all the requirements of any cash crops which may follow in rotation. In other words the ley or temporary pasture can be the sole provider of food and fertility for soil and livestock. A piece of barren land left to nature sooner or later becomes a pasture, provided it starts with some means of maintaining life. Many a piece of barren land has been abandoned by man because of his inability to restore fertility. Soil is the source of all life, but soil without herbage is inert and incapable of giving life; hence the key to the life of the soil is the herbage which covers and permeates the top soil and converts the subsoil rock and mineral into vital nutriment for man and beast.
Farming is the process of utilizing the life of the soil for the maintenance of man and beast, involving the growing and removal of varying proportions of the living substance of the soil. Husbandry is the balancing of that process by rotational alternating periods of extraction and re-creation. The secret of good husbandry is the proper utilization of the herbage, which, in partnership with the animal, has the ability to rebuild the fertility of the most inert of soils; of converting, with the aid of air, sunlight and moisture, a barren rock into a living soil. The husbandman of to-day can imitate nature's process of soil restoration with herbage by means of the ley or temporary pasture. Nature's pasture, though a complex mixture of herbage, is limited to the species and varieties which are available within bird-carrying distance. Man, on the other hand, is able to select his ingredients according to the needs of the soil and the animals which will ultimately graze the pasture. Nature's pasture, though always fertility-building for the soil, is not necessarily abundantly nutritive to the animal, for its yield is limited by the variety of grasses, clovers and herbs available in the neighbourhood, and the quality of its herbage by the treatment which it subsequently receives.
The first purpose of a natural pasture, therefore, appears to be to cover the soil, to correct the balance in the soil, and to build the fertility of the soil. The value of the pasture for grazing purposes depends almost entirely on the extent to which it is grazed, the variety of grazing which it receives, and the times of year at which it is grazed.
It almost seems that nature provides the basic coverage or pasture and leaves it to the animal to adjust the quality and value of the pasture for grazing purposes. I have seen rough grazing turned into good pasture with nothing more than good grazing management. I have also seen newly re-seeded pastures of expensive ingredients turned into poor rough grazing by bad grazing management.
The main purpose of man-made pastures has usually been to provide for his domestic animals their summer feeding requirements and a part of their winter needs. Any benefit to soil fertility in the process of providing that food has been only a secondary consideration. Soil fertility has rarely been regarded as any more than a very unimportant by-product of food production. In the majority of leys the ingredients are planned exclusively for their potential bulk yield above ground, with no thought for the underground or top-soil effect of the ingredients. Further, little or none of the product of the pasture is normally fed back to the soil directly for soil fertility purposes.
I want in this book to show the greater, indeed almost all-sufficient value, of the ley, when its soil fertility potentialities are placed first in order of importance, as in nature. I want to demonstrate how, when we make a pasture on nature's model of complex ingredients, for the primary purpose of building soil fertility, we can also achieve for the grazing animal, food of a quality which will enable the animal to maintain its own health and fertility and produce abundantly of milk and progeny.
Accepting the main purpose of the temporary pasture to be fertility in soil and animal (in that order) I must at this point define what I mean by fertility.
Fertility in the soil means to me the ability to produce abundant yields of crops which are disease-free, the seeds of which have the capacity to reproduce healthy crops and to transmit health, productive ability and fertility to the animal and human consumer.
This means, that in order to be considered fertile, a soil must not only yield in quantity, but a full complement in that quantity of all the essentials of a vigorous and fertile life—minerals, micro-elements, vitamins, plant hormones—the essentials of health and growth; proteins, carbo-hydrates, fats—the essentials of nutrition and live-weight increase. If any of these factors is found to be lacking in the ultimate consumer of the crop grown in a particular soil, it may be assumed that the soil was not fully fertile.
Quality in food is the end-product of a fertile soil. All the above-mentioned essentials that such a soil must transmit to the grazing pasture, are the ingredients of quality in that pasture. Additionally, quality implies vitality or life; and for the human consumer also flavour, both of which are absent in synthetic foods, or foods which are over-stimulated during their period of growth. The word whole to my mind conveys the meaning which we seek in food quality: for to have quality, food must be whole in the essentials of health, life and the power to reproduce life.
The orthodox scientist normally measures the fertility of a soil by its bulk yield, with no relation to effect on the ultimate consumer.
I have seen cattle slowly lose condition and fall in milk yield when fed entirely on the abundant produce of an apparently fertile soil. Though the soil was capable of yielding heavy crops, those crops were not adequate in themselves to maintain body-weight and milk production in the cow, without supplements. That soil, though capable of above-average yields, and by the orthodox quantitative measure regarded as fertile, could not, by the more complete measure of ultimate effect on the consumer, be regarded as anything but deficient in fertility.
Fertility therefore, is the ability to produce, at the highest recognized level of yield, crops of a quality which, when consumed over long periods by animals or man, enable them to sustain health, bodily condition and high level of production without evidence of disease or deficiency of any kind.
Fertility cannot be measured quantitatively. Any measure of soil fertility must be related to the quality of its produce. The fact that sterility has resulted in animals grazing and depending entirely for their nutrition on pastures which by all orthodox quantitative measures are fully fertile, is an indication of the failure of the quantitative measure when unrelated to ultimate effect.
To put it in a few words: the most simple measure of soil fertility is its ability to transmit, through its produce, fertility to the ultimate consumer. Any breakdown or deficiency in the animal or human dependant is a measure of the infertility of the original soil from which the animal or human has derived its food.
It is evident then that just as fertility is the ability to yield food of a quality capable of transmitting fertility, so quality in food is possible only from a fertile soil.
This brings me to the conclusion that we should use our rotational pastures or leys, firstly for the purpose of building and maintaining soil fertility, secondly to provide summer grazing, and thirdly to provide food for the winter in the form of silage or hay, and a proportion of winter grazing. Experimenting over the past fifteen years, on the basis of such reasoning, I have developed a system of ley farming which provides, with the assistance of organic manuring, the sole requirements for soil fertility and the necessary replenishment of crop nutrients; which gives all the food requirements of the dairy herd for the greater part of the year. The cows help themselves to this food whether it is in grazing the ley, eating the silage from the ley, or other forage crops such as kale or oats and vetches, which, for a short time in the year, are used to assist the ley in providing the bulk of the animal's nutritional needs.
The reason that I came to regard the ley as the main provider of food for my cattle during those years, was the belief, which arose from my study of animal diseases, that these diseases are mostly caused by our manner of feeding our cattle. I came to the conclusion that all animal disease had its real foundation in the toxic condition of the animal body, brought about by unnatural methods of management and in particular the method of feeding. I found that even home-grown foods, when forced with chemical fertilizers, could not keep my animals in health. Orthodox feeding of dairy cattle had as its primary aim the stimulation of maximum milk yield, with little or no regard for the health of the cow, and hardly any means in the dietary of assuring the health essentials which are contained in fresh food grown in naturally-manured, humus-rich soil. These factors, which the nutritionists have failed to isolate, are nevertheless available from fresh-growing forage crops in a form which cannot be provided in manufactured compound foods. We are learning more and more of the value of minor elements in nutrition and health maintenance, which have until recently been disregarded by the scientist or were unknown to him. Plant hormones, for instance, are no doubt a potent factor in the development of essential hormone secretions in the animal body, yet hormones cannot be substituted artificially through the plant to the animal in the way they unquestionably are when the animal grazes a ley or forage crop with its roots still in the earth. Under modern methods of feeding the dairy cow, the higher the yield of the cow the less natural food is she allowed to have. The greater her potentiality for milk production the lower her intake of the foods which are rich in the natural essentials of health.
In 1943 I wrote the following: 'Health goes in at the mouth, and if we cut down the health-giving foods provided by Nature to function in ways that we cannot fully understand, all the veterinary surgeons in the world will not save our cows from a doom which commercialized (i.e. commercially controlled) science is designing for them . . . my cows must be given their food as far as possible while it still has its roots in Mother Earth. And, in the degree which natural feeding is not possible, I must provide the widest possible variety of herbs as sources of the mineral and trace elements essential to health.'
Herbal pastures of three to five years' duration have proved to be the complete answer to my requirements in the provision of soil fertility and health-giving animal nutrition. The herbal ley is my manure merchant, my food manufacturer and my vet, all in one; and, what is more to the point for the working farmer, it produces an average of eight to nine hundred gallons of milk each from Jersey cows at a cost which would put all three of these friends of the orthodox farmer completely out of business if they were compelled to cut their charges to the same rate as it costs to feed my cows and keep them in health by means of the herbal ley.
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It is just about eleven years since I first considered my cattle-feeding and management methods sufficiently successful to justify publishing them. In spite of the depression through which the Boutflour system of 'cut-the-bulk-increase-the concentrates' was passing, owing to the rationing of concentrates, I got little or no encouragement from the experts.
The orthodox farming press had no space for my ideas; the advocacy of natural home-grown bulky food and the natural prevention and treatment of disease, enticed no advertisement revenue. And though cattle-cake advertisers could at that time do little more than prestige advertising, it was safe to assume that the war would end one day, and the full-page adverts of cattle foods and supplements would once more proclaim disease and death to the cow and increasing profits to the food processors and mass-circulation publishers.
The cash-controlled farm gates were closed not only to my revolutionary methods—but even to the non- advertisement- revenue- earning, yet obviously beneficial, ideas of others.
Tripod haymaking, which we featured in several issues of The Farmer in 1946 and 1947, describing my, and other organic farmers', successful use of the system in previous years, was spurned as impracticable. The late Captain Alexander Proctor, who I am glad to say lived just long enough to see official acceptance of his system, was, with no encouragement from the experts or the orthodox press, having an uphill struggle to persuade farmers to try this foolproof system of 'weatherproof haymaking' (the description which I suggested to him and which has since been widely adopted). He was not a potential large advertiser and relied on personal recommendations from one farmer to another and the hard work of some fellow enthusiasts. I wrote and distributed 20,000 copies of a pamphlet called Weatherproof Harvesting (now out of print but being revised and reprinted), which has, no doubt, over the past seven or eight years, helped towards the present-day acceptance of this system as the only effective way of making good-quality, high-protein hay; its enthusiastic use by the director of a Ministry of Agriculture Experimental Farm; the commencement of national advertising by the manufacturers of tripods; and, at last, featuring of the system in the national farming press—or at least the braver section of it.
But tripod haymaking was always just a common-sense way of doing a particular job of work on the farm. I tell this short story of my early advocacy of it, merely to illustrate the slow acceptance of even the simplest farming improvements when the loud fanfares of high finance are not available to move the mass-circulation journals out of their mercenary rut.
So it is a matter of great satisfaction to me that, after only eleven years of preaching reliance on home-grown forage as the most economical way to healthy milk production; the breeding of cattle capable of converting natural foods; the avoidance of high protein stimulation as a safeguard against diseases, and exploding the myth of excessive yields obtained at high cost in food and health; that some or all of these ideas (which were without a kind word in official circles and orthodox press when I first advocated them) are now finding favour and successful practice by a number of leading authorities, and, what is even more gratifying, gaining publicity in the orthodox farming press.
An article of mine published in June 1944, said: 'It is surely better farming to keep two 750-gallon cows, producing milk at a cost of 1s. a gallon, than one 1,500-gallon cow producing milk at a cost of 1s. 6d. a gallon. The difference in profit on milk alone would be considerable, to say nothing of the value of the extra calf in a pedigree herd. In other words what matters is not so much how much milk a cow gives but the cost in cash and disease of producing each gallon of milk.'
In 1945, summarizing the methods I had found successful in developing a disease-free low-cost milk-producing herd, I wrote the following, which was published in Soil and Health and later enlarged upon in Fertility Farming.
'Thus I reached my conclusions regarding the real causes of disease in cattle, which I summarize as follows:
'Artificial feeding with concentrated foods which lack the health factors of fresh whole foods. Scientific feeding of dairy cattle has as its primary aim the stimulation of maximum milk yield with little consideration for the health of the cow, with no means of assuring the provision of those health essentials which are contained in fresh food grown in naturally manured, humus-rich soil, and which the nutritionist has so far failed to isolate and prepare artificially for inclusion in manufactured compound foods.
'What are the main differences, that our herds should contain so much more disease to-day than they did in my father's and grandfather's day? Intensified exploitation of the dairy cow, artificial feeding, and the mad race for higher and higher yields with all the attendant artificial practices which have multiplied as disease has become more widespread. . . .
'I must provide adequately of all the bulky natural foods before considering concentrated feeding; kale, silage, hay and straw must come before cake.'
Now in 1954 in articles in The Dairy Farmer, based on a development of my natural bulk-feeding methods, Mr. Stephen Williams, Farm Director of Boots' Farms in Nottinghamshire, starts with the heading: 'This 4 lb. per gallon cut- down- the- bulk system is wrong!' and says:
'Every dairy farmer who has adopted feeding according to yield and bulk control will admit, if he is honest, that although maybe he gets a few higher yields, his costs per gallon rise and so does his vet's bill.
'And the higher the yields go beyond a certain average, the more the food and veterinary expenses rise.
'Thus many farmers are building a form of dairy farming in which the average life of a biggish dairy cow goes something like this: first calf, 1,000 to 1,200 gallons; second calf, the same again; third calf, no more than 1,000 gallons—then out, through disease, disaster or death.'
Disadvantages of the orthodox system are given as follows:
'The cow is given increasing amounts of concentrated food and less bulk, despite the fact that she is designed to consume high-quality roughage foods.
'She is deliberately steamed up in a short period before calving just when her hormone system is diverting food to udder and mam-mary development; consequently the development is overdone.
'At her peak yield, when body metabolism is working at its , hardest and is acutely responsive to any upset, she is overloaded with concentrates with which she is not fitted to deal and underfed with food appropriate to her digestive system.
'She is denied the benefit of being reduced to a nice breeding condition once a year.
'Through being forced for a high peak yield she develops a hock-slapping bag subject to easy injury and bad for machine milking.
'She is denied the opportunity of developing capacity—without which she cannot achieve maximum efficiency in using quality roughage foods.'
He goes on in his second article to describe his system:
'It is a very simple system. It involves allowing a cow to eat all the high-quality roughage food she will eat, whether she is at peak yield, at low yield, or dry. And she also gets a fairly level amount of concentrates—from 4 to 12 or 14 lb. a day.
'Of course, this sounds odd after years of propaganda for feeding according to yield and controlling bulk. But it is far from odd when it is examined in the light of modern knowledge.
'To begin with, scientific research is producing more and more evidence every day to prove to us what we all really know and what we seem to have forgotten—that a cow is a ruminating animal with a digestive apparatus designed to extract the nutrients she requires from fibrous foods.'
Also pursuing my system of natural feeding, Mr. J. R. Stubbs started another series of articles on 'forage' farming and said:
'It is a system by which farmers can make the greatest possible use of cheaply produced, high quality, labour-saving grazed crops.
'What is more, despite the fact that milk sales per cow may only average 700 to 750 gallons on forage farming, the milk yield per acre is substantially increased simply because forage production per acre is so high that stocking rates can be much heavier.
'And as we are limited in acres but not number of cows, clearly the acre must be the unit of ultimate importance.
'This is a new way to look at dairy farming. The old way was to increase total income by feeding expensive foods to get more milk per cow. It succeeded—but at less profit per gallon.
The new way is to increase milk yields per acre by carrying more stock on cheaper foods and so increase the margin between cost of production and selling price that farm income can be raised even if the price of milk is lowered.
'The system offers other benefits to commend it. Because the cows do most of their own food carting, the labour costs of cow management are reduced. Because the cows do their own dung spreading, labour costs are still further reduced. Cow-hours cost very little; man-hours cost 3s. each.
'The evidence we have so far also suggests that the health of animals is better under forage farming than under traditional methods, that they live longer and produce better; they get into exceptionally good condition during their dry periods and there are fewer breeding problems.
'When cows have access to forage crops at the right stage of growth, milk yields are then better maintained during the normally difficult months of July, November and January than they are when concentrates are fed as the main milk-producing foods.'
In The Farmers' Weekly recently, Rex Paterson wrote a detailed article asking the question: 'Do we want these High Yields?', and concluding that at the present cost of concentrated feeding-stuffs they are no longer a proposition. He, too, advocated reasonable yields on bulky home-grown foods as the common-sense course. He said: 'It is high time to question whether high yield per cow is really a measure of efficiency and to consider yields in terms of milk per acre.'
Professor Cooper of Wye College, among many others, is preaching the value of leys as the most economical food for the milking cow: in winter as silage or hay and in summer for grazing.
And when the Chief Agricultural Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture, Sir James Scott Watson, says that the time has come when we must consider costs in relation to higher yields (of crops this time) we are getting somewhere. . Read this extract from the report of an interview he gave to The Farmers' Weekly:
'Although Sir James believes that still higher yields can be achieved, he views the future with his feet firmly planted on the ground. There is a risk, he pointed out, that we may forget our old experience and jump into exploiting scientific discoveries a little too eagerly at times.
'If you take the farming of the eastern counties, nobody would suggest a return to the old four-course rotation, but it is rather a big change from that to barley, after barley after barley.
'If you use MCPA instead of fallow crops, it does not necessarily mean that that is the complete answer—because there are winter stock, muck and other things to consider.
'Specialization is still bringing us difficulties with soil-borne diseases. Potato eelworm is the outstanding example. We are worried, too, about cereal root eelworm, which seems to be spreading. Take-all and eyespot have taken a pretty heavy toll on some farms in recent years.'