Such a herd will consume rye-grass carted from the field from April to November, and mangolds, kohl-rabi, and rye-grass hay during the winter, thus securing a uniform demand for produce of the sewage land throughout the year, and such cows will only require a little cotton cake and oat straw bedding (of which latter they eat a good deal) to fit them for sale to the butcher as soon as they become dry.
The advantage of such a steady demand is so great when rye-grass and mangolds, etc., are indicated as the
main crops of the farm, owing to the large volume of sewage per acre, that the system of cow-keeping is forced upon managers, however reluctant their sanitary authorities may be to provide the necessary working capital, unless they can find a reliable contractor to receive at a fixed price any quantity of grass and roots the authority may grow and deliver.
Permanent pasture grazed and for hay available in certain cases.
When a town has more land in proportion to its sewage, permanent pasture may take the place of Italian rye-grass, and, with proper precautions, a part of the permanent pasture may be grazed; but the saving of labour, thus supposed to result from letting animals bite and carry their food, is expended in making up, in a necessarily imperfect manner, the carriers trodden in by the cattle.
Importance of neat tidy contour carriers, correctly levelled.
And here I would observe that most of the bad odour into which sewage farming has fallen of late years is distinctly traceable to the common absence of sufficient regularly contoured and neatly cut distribution carriers resulting from parsimony about wages bills natural to the ratepayers’ representatives in Council, and often to the manager’s dependence on a borough surveyor’s coming to the farm with his level and staff for great measures, or on his own guesses for smaller works, instead of using an instrument to peg out every distribution carrier at the right moment.
Attract good labour.
There is another important outlay of capital to be provided for in every complete sewage scheme, which should embrace sufficient good labourers’ houses and gardens in order to attract and retain on the spot the best class of workers.
Summary of the experience of a lifetime.