to grass, but I soon found that however well you prepared the soil and however careful one might be in the seeding, the better and finer grasses would not live and thrive on the poor oolite brash I had to deal with. I found also that the condition of most of the land after 1879 was so foul, especially the farms which successively came on my hands, that it would cost more to clean many fields than they were worth; and that land, which as the saying is had “ tumbled down to grass ” without any culti¬ vation or sowing at all, was not very inferior in herbage to others which had cost perhaps £3 or £4 an acre for preparation and seed.
Another thing which occupied my attention very seriously at this time was the new plan of making ensilage instead of hay. I made a tour in order to visit places where this system had been tried, so as to learn not only how to make it best and cheapest but also to see the condition of animals which had largely lived upon it. Among these were Lord Walsingham’s farm in Norfolk, and a place in Upper Wensleydale in Yorkshire, where I found cattle which had lived the whole winter on ensilage alone in very fair condition, and was assured that a greater number could he so wintered than when they were fed as the custom of the country was, on hay alone. I came to the conclusion that the building of special silos either above or below ground was a useless expense, and would have nothing to do with the various mechanical contrivances for pressing the contents of the silo. I had one of the bays in the stone barns Which arc found on every Cotswold farm bricked up and cemented inside, bought a lot of dunnage hoards from Gloucester corn merchants, and after filling the bay with grass cut short by a chaff-cutter, keeping it well raked level and rammed well down round the wall during the process of filling, covered it with the dunnage boards and weighted it with a dead weight of bricks in rough boxes or old stone rick-staddles hoisted up with a pulley.
This proved such an economical and excellent feeding stuff when mixed in equal proportions with oat-straw chaff that, though I had a good deal of prejudice among my stockmen against the new fodder the first year, I have now made it regularly for every year since 1882 except one very dry year when I had no grass wet or juicy enough to make good silage with. I found that it immensely reduced the consumption of corn and cake, kept my dry cows and store cattle in excellent health and condition through the winter, saved a lot of labour in hauling roots to the yards, converted grass and late oats which would otherwise have been spoilt by the weather into nourishing fodder, and generally was for a late damp climate, as mine was during most of my first fourteen years’ farming, one of the greatest improvements in modern practice. I put up a silo at every homestead, ane though on one or two occasions people who were new to it complained a bit at first of the smell, all my men finally agreed that it was perfectly harmless. The bad smell which sometimes comes from badly made silage is not the fault of the stuff but the fault of the maker. Though I made some ricks of silage as well during the first few years, I have since given them up, as indeed many others have done since we have had a succession of good haymaking seasons.
In my early farming days I believed that the secret of success was to
