Grass as a source of animal feeding stuffs

Abstract

AGRICULTURAL statistics show that grassland of some kind or other occupies nearly three-quarters of the agricultural land in Great Britain. The grassland can be divided into three main groups : rough grazings, permanent, and temporary grass. The rough grazings include all those poor and thin mountain and hill pastures which form such a surprisingly high proportion of the total land surface. The next largest group is that of permanent grass for hay or for grazing. The temporary grass is really a part of the arable land of the country since it is ploughed up at intervals of varying length, and is a valuable preparation for the succeeding crops, the so-called tillage crops. These latter are sometimes fed directly to human beings, but a large proportion is used for feeding to our farm animals.In Great Britain we have approximately 45,276,000 acres under agricultural use and of this 16,793,000 are permanent or temporary grass,-an area equal to some 37% of the land in use. Rough grazings account for a further 16,481,000 acres, or 36%, and the tillage crops cover the remaining 270/:, of the land.The rough grazings are not highly productive, though they are obviously not used to their full capacity. They represent a distinct problem in economic usage and no marked increase in production can be expected. It would in fact be a bad policy to spend too much money on the improvement of such land, when, as will be seen, there are such vast areas of better land under bad grass which would better repay the expenditure. This is not, of course, to say that a good deal could not and should not be done to improve the rough grazings : it merely emphasizes the point that the return would be greater on the other grassland.There are 5,552,000 acres of rough grazings in England and Wales, that is, 19% of the agricultural land; but in Scotland the area is ro,g4g,ooo acres, which means that no less than 71% of the agricultural land north of the Border is rough, hill, or mountain grazing.The important fact in the consideration of the potential value of grassland is that the area of permanent and temporary grass is greater than that under arable crops other than grass. There are 14,15z,ooo acres of permanent and temporary grass in England and Wales, accounting for 47% of the cultivated land, 12% of this being temporary grass and the remaining 35% permanent grass. In Scotland the grassland area is 2,641,000 acres, which represent 17% of the agricultural land, almost equally divided between temporary grass and permanent grass covering 9 and 8% of the cultivated land.The important figures for Great Britain are : IZ,OOZ,OOO acres under tillage crops and 16,793,000 acres covered by grassland excluding the rough grazings ; nearly 70% of the grassland is under permanent grass.Stamp,l in a recent discussion of the utilization of land in Great Britain, has emphasized this high proportion of permanent grassland but suggests that we shall always have 20% of our total agricultural land in this form. This means some reduction on the present figure of 26%...

Need of a Unified System for Measuring Range Productivity

“…Measurement of grassland production poses many unique problems for the researcher. Watson (1950) considers accurate evaluations of pasture yields one of the most difficult techniques in agricultural experiments. Unlike other crops, grass yields are rarely meas-ured at any one pre-determined time; the total yield may be the sum of two or more harvests or harvest may be a continuous process over a considerable period of time during which the crop continues to grow.…”