There are still farmers who question the wisdom of breaking old pasture and replacing it, either after corn crops or direct, with a new seeds' mixture. There are many more who, in accepting the necessity for renewing their pastures periodically, buy their seeds' mixtures on price rather than a careful study of ingredients, the individual functions of each ingredient and their potential productivity.
The following costings for a complex, and at first sight apparently extravagant mixture, as well as a comparatively simple mixture—each on similar soil—give a convincing answer to both the sceptic and the scrooge. The figures show how profitable re-seeding with even a simple mixture can be; but they demonstrate even more convincingly the vastly greater production that is possible from a carefully chosen complex herbal mixture. And what these figures have not assessed is the benefit in animal health which resulted from the herbal pasture as compared with the shallow-rooting simple mixture. But that, considerable as it is, was not the intention of this chapter, which is to say that no land, however rough or poor, will not pay to re-seed, if the methods for building fertility pastures are followed.
COSTS AND RETURNS ON TWENTY ACRES HERBAL LEY (Two fields of twelve and eight acres) Direct seeded after green-manuring crop. Mixture
Seed at £10 200 Composting 50 Mustard 20 Discing in Green Crop 30 Rolling 10 Sowing Seed 5 Rolling 10 --- £325
or 20 acres at say £16 5s. an acre—an extremely expensive ley by orthodox standards. But I have deliberately chosen this extravagant example to demonstrate the importance of not stinting seeds, cultivations, and organic or green manuring, in establishing the best leys, and to show how handsomely it has paid in spite of (perhaps because of) the initial cost.
The ley was not costed in its first three years but even in its fourth year it produced from April 1st to October 31st, £1,484 worth of milk.
The only assistance given was the use of one ton of dredge corn valued at £30, i.e. net production of milk from the ley alone was £1,254 or a total output of £74 an acre in the summer months only of its fourth year. Though actual figures are not available it is reasonable to assume that its production was at least equal in each of the previous three summers.
The only treatment the fields had during their four years of life were one light dressing of compost, not more than five tons an acre, and frequent topping with the mower, occasionally feeding back rather a heavier growth than is customary, with the normal topping off after grazing.
Grazing was closely controlled by means of an electric fence limiting the cows to not less than ten cows to the acre—moving them when growth was not quite all grazed, mowing off the residue and leaving it as a mulch to feed back to the soil, and moving the cows to the next paddock whether or not there was much growth on the new paddock. Except for a short spell of a few weeks' drought in midsummer, there was usually more than enough growth on the new paddock before the cows were ready for it, for the twenty acres was divided into nine change paddocks. Indeed at two periods of the year it was possible to cut from growth surplus to the cows' grazing requirements a total of eight tons of tripod hay and twenty tons of silage.
This compares with the much lower costs and returns on a proportionately lower acreage of a simple mixture as follows:
10 lb. Perennial Ryegrass
10 lb. Cocksfoot
2 lb. S.100 Clover
3 lb. Late-flowering Red Clover
----
25 lb. an acre,
costing 85s. an acre for twelve acres
Costs
£ s. d.
Manure 26 0 0
Sowing 1 12 0
Rolling 6 0 0
Seed 51 0 0
Rolling 6 0 0
Fencing 400
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£94 12 0
or £7 15s. an acre, or roughly half the cost of the good herbal ley done well with green-manuring crop.
This mixture provided a good long grazing period, the perennial ryegrass predominating in April and May with an abundance of S. 100 clover; the cocksfoot providing most of the bulk with late-flowering red clover in June and July and both coming well again in late August to October. This field was also divided with an electric fence and grazed at the rate of ten cows to the acre rotationally.
Returns
or approximately £52 an acre in its first year or £22 an acre less than the herbal ley in its fourth year.
There are very few areas of land, however rough, so long as a tractor is capable of being negotiated around them, that will not pay handsomely for re-seeding with a good mixture. I have described some of my hill re-seeding experiences in earlier writings, but it is worth repeating one of them here from Fertility Farming.
When I first started to clear the scrub on Ball Hill, ready to re-seed it, the local pundits were extremely sceptical, though, I fancy a little curious. It had never been more than a rabbit-run before, and even the rabbits had to move down the hill to find food. The soil is shallow and the slope is such that a crawler tractor could only plough it one way, and that with some trepidation on the part of the driver.
My neighbour said: 'It's all very nice as a piece of spectacular work, but it won't pay you.' I did not think I should lose anything on it and, in any case, I could not make the hill any worse than it was. I had been costing my leys lower down the hill and knew that if I could get a 'take' I should not be out of pocket.
The County Agricultural Committee was at that time quoting £10 an acre for average re-seeding work, and in the minds of many farmers even this price seemed too high when set against estimated returns. I could not get a quotation for Ball Hill, which meant that the cost was likely to be in excess of a price which was considered by many to be prohibitive.
Neither the County Agricultural Committee nor the various other advocates of ley farming have yet been able to provide figures, derived from farm costings, to show convincingly that the re-seeding of some of our best pastures is a profitable proposition. The best that has been offered in the way of encouragement is the vague promise of two or three times the grazing capacity, depending on the quality of the land re-seeded.
But the man who considers his present pastures good is not going to rip up his good old grass, spend £10 to £15 an acre on re-seeding it, and run the risk of an unsuccessful take, merely on the strength of an uncertain prospect of doubled grazing capacity. He will prefer the certain grazing for half the stock, and resort to the nitrogen bag for a temporary increase in stocking capacity—unless he is convinced in actual demonstration, backed by evidence of solid returns under ordinary farming conditions.
Failing authentic details of this kind I tried to produce them for myself, and found that the claims made for leys, which have been guesses in most cases, are extremely modest when compared with the costed returns from well-managed leys.
The Dairy Farmer is now sponsoring a most valuable grassland recording scheme, which will do more than all past expert advocacy to demonstrate the value of the ley and to improve grassland utilization.
It is to be hoped that growers of the herbal leys described in this book will take part and show the superior yields of these herbal leys or fertility pastures.
Ball Hill cost me over £12 an acre; I had no cash crop to take in the first year; yet it paid the full cost and a profit in grazing value in twelve months from the time of seeding. And this was from store cattle only: the returns from milking cows would no doubt have been much more.
The six acres provided me with 304 heifer-weeks of grazing during the first twelve months from seeding. At a charge of 5s. per head per week, which is reasonable considering the high quality of the grazing and the grand condition in which the heifers were maintained, the repayment on my outlay of £74 17s. l1d. was £76.
This return was purely from heifer and in-calf cow grazing. No account was taken of milk returns on two occasions when the cows were turned in to help control the growth. This means, then, that my ley was paid for in its first year, leaving me with grazing of a quality equal to the best in the district, in place of a useless scrubby sheep-run that would not support a buck rabbit before. The re-seeding was done in 1943, and was repeated in 1951, so that the initial cost was spread over eight years.
It is clear beyond doubt from these figures that good [leys pay well, both as grazing for young stock and for milking cows. While the visible profit is the greater when milk cows are the agents of conversion, the foundation of sound health which young stock undoubtedly gain from ley grazing probably raises the lower cash returns of this class of grazing to a level of equal value with dairy-cow leys.
But if, by cheap mixtures and stinted cultivations, the attempt is made to keep down costs, ley farming will soon land the most affluent farmer in queer street. The best obtainable mixture for the class of land, carefully sown in well-cultivated land which has previously been well supplied with organic manure and green manuring crops, followed by intelligent management, will more than repay the original cost of a four-year ley every year of its life.
The mixture I used for Ball Hill was similar to that on page 120.
I have since found, for very shallow hill land liable to suffer from lack of moisture, the following mainly tap-rooted herb mixture will survive the worst droughts—by penetrating the rock for its last drop of moisture:
4 lb. Crested Dogtail
4 lb. Tall Fescue
4 lb. Lucerne
4 lb. Ribgrass or Common Plantain
(Plantago lanceolata)
2 lb. Late-flowering Red Clover
2 lb. Alsike
2 lb. Trefoil
1 lb. S.100 White Clover
2 lb. American Sweet Clover
1/2 lb. Yarrow.
1 lb. Broad Leaved Plantain
(Plantago Major)
Ball Hill provided in subsequent years an average of £40 an acre of grazing for four years, and rapidly deteriorated in the fifth to the seventh years because of the thin soil and its exposure to the sun as it faced due south.
It was duly re-seeded in the eighth year with a deep-rooting herbal mixture at an increased cost, and should now last longer and produce even more heavily for the initial period of stocking it has had; though as it has been turned over to pigs, they may by their damage shorten the life of the ley. They have a great fondness for the roots of the deep-rooting herbs when they are folded at all thickly on the ground—and this is likely to happen. However, though experts were discouraging I am convinced that bringing six acres of one-in-four slope into production, first to graze heifers and now to graze the pigs of my successor, was well worth while and a great justification of the ley as a food-producer and soil-saver.
The man who is aiming at 800 to 900 gallons a lactation on cheap but healthy food, with the profit high because his labour cost is low and his fertilizer and cake bill non-existent, gets even greater advantages from re-seeding with herbal leys.
These advantages are not easy to measure, but, put in motoring terms, one of them is the longer life of the 'engine', in this case the cow, from not running it 'flat out'. Consider these replacement costs: if you rear a Jersey calf on a cow it will cost not more than £10 to do it well without getting it too fat; see my book, Herdsmanship, for my rearing methods. It is weaned from milk on to roughage—grass in summer, silage and perhaps sometimes a little hay in winter, and has nothing else—and needs nothing else but its natural food after all—until it calves into the herd. The cost of grass and silage is not more than 5s. a week for say twenty months after weaning, say £5. The calf has helped itself to milk from a cow, it helps itself to grass from the ley and silage from the silage heap, so labour costs chargeable to it are small: £5 for labour under this system is a generous charge—making the total cost of bringing the heifer into the herd £20.
If you want to buy a replacement for the cow you've ruined by 'reckless driving' you will pay 80-100 guineas for a moderate specimen. If you have more money than sense you will pay 200 or 300 guineas for the daughter of a cow that has been raced full out to 1,500 or 2,000 gallons of milk, leaving her no reserves of health to transmit to her progeny.
So rear your own my lazy way, on mother's milk and grass or silage from healthy leys; drive her within the 'speed' limit of her breeding, and spread your already low outlay over an extra four or five lactations, as you can easily do with grass-fed cows. Spend your money on good organic herbal leys, and you won't have to spend your money on useless, and in many cases harmful, veterinary drugs.
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