Independent Farming for Self-Sufficiency

Some of the best grassland in the world is permanent
pasture, and it is a crime to plough it up. Some of the
finest fattening pastures in England, such as the Romney
Marsh and some of the Leicestershire fattening pastures,
were ploughed up during the Second World War, owing to
stupid decisions made by ignorant people, and have never
yet recovered. Much permanent pasture, though, is pretty
rough, and not very productive. It can be rendered more so
by ploughing up and re seeding, or by treatment that does
not involve ploughing up. Very heavy and drastic harrowing
does a lot of good; you can drag it about until it looks as
if most of the grass has been destroyed and the grass will
be the better for it. Dressing with lime if it needs lime
will often work wonders, as will slag or other phosphorous
dressing. Both lime and phosphate encourage the clover at
the expense of the grasses, and this is generally all to
the good. Good draining is, of course, a sine qua non.
Grass (when I use the word grass I mean grass and clover)
will give you far more yield if you graze it really hard
all at one time, and then rest it completely, rather than
if you keep nibbling at it all the time. This is because
the individual plants put down much better root growth if
they are not kept nibbled off all the time. It is always a
good thing to top grass, when it needs it, either with a
mower of some sort or a scythe. This cuts the flowering
heads off that the animals have left and forces the grass
to make leaf instead of going to seed, and also kills the
thistles. The application of nitrogen encourages the
grasses and suppresses the clovers. This is because the
clovers make their own nitrogen out of the atmosphere, by
means of the symbiotic bacteria which live in their root
nodules. This gives them an unfair advantage over the
grasses. If you apply soluble nitrogen you take away this
unfair advantage, and the grasses will grow at the expense
of the clover. If you want very high yields from grass you
must put on nitrogen and sacrifice the clovers. Personally
I would prefer to give adequate phosphates and lime, and
potash if it needs it, and this encourage the clovers and
then I don’t have to pay for nitrogen: the clover makes it.
It has been proved conclusive, that the grass produced by
heavy applications of nitrogen not so nutritious as that
grown otherwise, but of course if they are, say, selling
hay what does that matter? If you are using the hay
yourself, though, it is a very different story. All
nitrogen in the bag is expensive. And if ever there is a
poorly shortage (nitrogen is fixed commercially from the
air by the expenditure of electrical power) it will become
more so. Heavy applications of farmyard manure do nothing
but good. The manure rots down and disappears very
quickly: actually earthworms drag it down into the soil.
But if it is cow manure don’t graze the land with cows for
a while — no animal likes grazing near its own droppings.
Where cows have been grazing in a field for long you will
find long green tufts of grass growing around, or after,
their droppings. The cows will not touch these. Put horses
in though, or sheep, and the tufts will very soon go. This
is another excellent reason for mixed stocking and not mono-stocking.

It is as well if you can retain some permanent pasture to
make your holding, if you are going to keep any animals.
remember in the Karroo, in the Cape Province, my employer
on a big sheep farm had ploughed up some veld (which was all sparsely growing Karroo bushes) and planted lucerne,
which he irrigated, In these paddocks he put his pedigree
rams. They began to sicken and some of them died. The vet
told him to re-fence the paddocks, taking in some of the
Karroo pasture. He did this and immediately the rams got
better. Ley pasture can be extremely productive, but
permanent pasture will have more of those minerals and
vitamins that animals require. So keep some permanent
pasture if you can possibly afford me land.

If you want to break up permanent pasture to make arable
land, or to plough and re-seed, then take my advice and do
it with pigs. Shove in your unringed pigs, fold them over
the land in small patches and move them on when they’ve
thoroughly rooted up the small patches; pull the land about
behind them with a spring tine harrow or a spring
cultivator; broadcast your seed. Another way (which we have
tried) is to plough the old pasture up rough and as you do
it plough Jerusalem artichokes in. Do this in the winter or
very early spring. The artichokes will grow and smother
every living thing under them with their dense, jungle like
cover. They will, if there are any about, attract pheasants
by the score. Never mind the pheasants — put the pigs in, in
late summer, fold them over the field all autumn and
winter, and the pigs will thrive and leave the land as
clean as a whistle. In the spring you can do what you want
with it.

Probably the most profitable use of a small piece of land
would be to farm it on a rotation that included one year in
four of a one year ley. The famous Norfolk Four Course
Rotation (wheat–roots–barley–one-year ley) is an example of
this. With the great variety of crops that the self
supporter will tend to grow his rotations must be far more
complicated. You might grow something like: wheat, roots or
kale to be fed to stock, potatoes or any of a great variety
of row crops that have to be hoed and thus lend themselves
to the suppression of weeds, ‘cleaning crops’ they are
called — then spring corn of some sort, barley, spring wheat
or oats — and undersow this with your ley: a grass and clover
mixture. If you have decided on a one-year ley this mixture
will be chiefly Italian rye-grass and red clover. A typical
seeds mixture for a one year ley might be: 20 pounds Italian
rye, 8 pounds red clover, 1 pound alsike. Italian rye-grass
gives an ‘early bite’, that is it comes up early in the
year when everything is dying for grass — soon after the
‘hungry gap’. In fact it shortens the latter and therefore
it is very valuable. You broadcast this seeds mixture after
you have either broadcast or drilled your spring corn
(barley, oats or spring wheat or rye — you couldn’t undersow
maize of course). You then harrow the land and the seeds
mixture will come up as an undercrop, with the corn as a
nurse crop. When you cut the corn you will have a good
stand of grass and clover. Graze it lightly the  first
autumn (the treading of the stock will help consolidate the
plants), rest it throughout the winter, and rejoice in an
‘early bite’ in March or April. After having had a full
summer’s use out of it — for grazing or hay — plough it up in
the autumn and sow your winter wheat in it. The winter corn
will benefit by the high fertility that is put into the
soil by the ploughing in of all that grass and clover, plus
the droppings of the animals that have grazed on it. The
‘root break’, that comes after the winter corn, is the one
that gets the heavy dressings of farmyard manure. If you
can put up to twenty tons to the acre on the land before
you sow the roots, or plant the spuds, so much the better.
If you go on treating your land in this way, and really hoe
your roots or cleaning crop, and really do it all well,
your land will increase steadily in fertility, workability
and freedom from perennial weeds. When you die you will
leave something valuable behind you: land in good heart.
There’s an immortality that is worth having.

You can, though, improve on the Norfolk Four Course
Rotation by the addition of a pig break. There are several
possibilities here. You should anyway run pigs over your
potato and root ground after you have lifted the crop to
clean it up and get what you have left. Or you could fold
pigs on the one year ley in the autumn and winter instead
of ploughing it up. The pigs will plough it up for you. But
that means that you can’t get winter wheat in it that year
— you’ll have to follow the pigs with a spring sown crop,
either roots or spring corn. There are endless variations
that you can play. Remember though that roots (turnips,
marigolds, fodder beets, sugar beets, potatoes, and
cabbages, kale or rapeseed by favour) are your cleaning crop.
You must hoe them and hoe them and kill the weeds. The ley,
whether one, two or three years old, is your putting-back-of-fertility crop. You are, with it, ploughing in a lot of
vegetable matter which all rots down to humus. The winter
corn, probably wheat, is a ‘cash crop’ in that it draws a
lot out of the land. So does the spring corn, but that acts
as a nurse for your ley. The roots, too, are a feeding crop
in that you ought to manure them heavily, to the benefit
not only of them but of the crops that come after.

If you want to have a two- or three-year ley, or longer,
then you will need a much more complicated seeds mixture,
and this is a fairly typical one:

12 pounds perennial rye grass

8 pounds Italian rye grass

6 pounds
cocksfoot grass

2 pounds red clover

2 pounds late red clover

1 pound alsike

1 pound Dutch white clover

But your agricultural adviser from the Ministry of
Agriculture will advise you on a suitable mixture for your
district. If you want to put down permanent pasture you
could have something like this:

14 pounds perennial rye-grass

8 pounds cocksfoot

4 pounds timothy

1 pound rough-stalked meadow grass

4 pounds late-flowering red
clover

1 pound wild white clover

32 pounds per acre

In the above the red clover is to give a good bulk of
clover the first year. If you can bear to sacrifice this
bulk in the first year I would leave it out. This will give
the wild white a better chance, and it is the wild white
that is going to give you your permanent clover component.
On very good rich land I would omit the cocksfoot. It will
grow too coarse and rampant, and is rather an unpalatable
grass anyway. Cut the timothy out on dry soils, it only
really comes into its own on wet land. On light land cut
the rough-stalked meadow grass out: that again is a wet
land crop, or on good strong loams or clays. Again don’t
hesitate to get expert advice about your particular
locality. There’s nothing to beat the advice of your
farming neighbors.

Deep rooting herbs are often included in
permanent grass mixtures. M. McG. Cooper suggests:

1 1/2 to 2 pounds chicory
1 1/2 to 2 pounds burnet
1 pound ribgrass or plantain
1 pound sheeps parsley

Personally I should leave out the plantain. M. McG.
Cooper’s book Grassland Farming is, incidentally, a very
good one.

To establish your pasture, broadcast the seed on
a very good firm seedbed either in the spring alone, in the
spring under a nurse crop (barley or oats or spring wheat)
or in late summer. If spring-sown graze it lightly later in the
first summer. If sown in the late summer graze it lightly
in the late spring. Don’t overgraze it the first summer.

Independent Farming: Hay

The earlier you cut the hay the more nutritious it will be,
but the smaller the tonnage of it. We cut ours in July
after the sheep shearing. Good weather is absolutely all-important. If it stays fine you may get all your hay under
cover in a few days and it will be perfect.

Cutting can be
done by scythe, horse mower or powered mower. A man is
supposed to be able to cut an acre a day with a scythe. I
have cut hay with a scythe, in South West Africa of all
places, and very hard work it is too. You must keep the
blade as sharp as a razor, and use a finer wet stone (or
‘rubber’) than that which you would use for corn. A horse-drawn mower needs two good horses. Pulling a mower is very
hard work for horses. The French have experimented with a
horse drawn mower the blade of which is driven not by the
ground wheels, but by a fractional horsepower petrol motor
like a chain saw motor. This is said to be wonderfully
effective, and its consumption of fuel is almost
negligible. I have not seen it, but believe such machines
can be seen working at Anthony, near Paris. Power mowers
can be reciprocating or rotary. This year our hay was late,
badly laid and matted and we hired a neighbor with a rotary
mower. It made a very good job.

The old fashioned method (in which I was brought up) was to
turn the swathes by hand either with a pitch fork or a
wooden rake, according to taste. As you turn them over
fluff them up. Nowadays you can get an astonishing variety
of machines to do this for you. There were some good
machines that were pulled by horses for doing this work.
When the hay is dry rake it up into big windrows, either
with the big wooden drag-rake or with a horse-rake. You can
still occasionally pick a horse-rake up fairly cheaply and
they are good tools. Then, when you are sure it is dry
enough, the old idea was to cock it. Pile it up into little
mini-stacks higher than a man and dome-shaped. Let it dry
in the cock until the green has really gone out of it. If
it is still too moist, and heating inside the cock, well
then you must break the cocks and spread it about a bit. If
it comes on to rain you must rush out and cock is quickly.
In the cock it won’t take much harm. When it is quite dry
you can cart it, and stack it. Either stack it in a barn or else thatch the stack with straw or rushes.

Even then your troubles are not over. If it is stacked out
of doors you must cut it with a stack knife before you can
feed it. And that’s a job to make the sweat run down your
face.

The modern way is to bale it. There are plenty of
contractors who will do this work, but everybody wants them
at once. The modern way is to throw the hay about hard as
soon as it is cuts-scatter it well. There is a great variety
of machines to do this, all tractor drawn. As soon as it is
anything like dry (you keep turning it about with machines
as often as you can) you get it into windrows again and
bale it. If the baler is busy somewhere else that day and
can’t come — and it pours with rain that night — well you may
lose half the value of your hay and you may lose it
altogether. If you can bale it though, it is pretty safe.
But as soon as you can get the bales under cover, you can
then heave a mighty sigh of relief and turn to a well-earned gallon or two of home brewed beer.

If you start the winter with at least a ton of hay per head
of large stock (cows and horses) and a few tons for any
sheep you may have, you can feel fairly secure. A very good
yield is two tons per acre: you may get less. You can bump
up the yield of grass enormously by applications of
nitrogenous fertilizer, it you have no ideological
objections to this. Personally I have pecuniary ones, but I
do it on a modest scale sometimes nevertheless.