West Midland farming is very varied—from intensive dairying in Cheshire and Staffordshire to intensive arable work in central Shropshire; from hop growing in Worcestershire and Herefordshire to store raising in the hills and summer feeding on the heavy clays of Warwickshire.

South Cheshire is the focal point of the great milk producing country which stretches from North Wales to Nottingham. Milk is the key note of farming throughout Cheshire and Staffordshire and a great part of north Shropshire. This was the home of farmhouse cheese-making. The region is naturally fertile and has been well worked for a long time; though lime shortage is still considerable. It is densely stocked with cows and carries a high human population; smallholdings are very numerous. No area in the country carries such a high cattle stock per acre. It looks as though numbers of cows have at last reached their peak, though the output of milk is still rising. There has been a great movement towards ensilage, particularly grass ensilage, in recent years. Attestation is now going strong after a slow start.

I am going to speak on die farming area that lies between Banbury, Rugby, Northampton and runs on to Harborough and the Welland Valley. I don't know much about the northern part of this area so my remarks will be confined to an area or about 20 miles round Daventry.

This part of England has been a fattening area for hundreds of years; the soil varies from clay to a stiff loam; rainfall is about 25 in. The land is fairly well fenced with thorn hedges and much of it is in ridge and furrow. It has never been manured extravagantly but quite a bit of linseed and cotton cake was fed when they were about £6 a ton. The grassland has been maintained by careful stock management; the manure was regularly “beaten” (i.e. spread) and still is in some cases. On every farm there is the best field, and the farm usually goes into four grades. The first will finish a bullock, the next a heifer, and the third a cow, and the last is store land.

It has often been said that “grass is the cheapest and healthiest feed we can offer our farm animals.” There is a fairly good body of evidence and some consensus of opinion that grass is a cheap food (see J. R. Currie, 1948, J. Brit. Grassl. Soc, 3:27).

Grass fed in situ is cheap for us in Britain, because it is a crop which in terms of nutrients per acre either tops the list or is always in the higher yield group among our farm crops. This is true whether we base our comparison on starch equivalent or on nitrogen (expressed as crude protein). Productive grassland is always high in its comparative values.

The following table will serve to emphasise this point.

This table is based on data published in 1941 by Leeds University, and is an example of the sort of figures frequently given in respect of different crops.

The increasing cost and scarcity of imported feeding-stuffs and the consequent increased importance of self-sufficiency has directed more and more attention to grassland in the past ten years, and with the spread of ley-farming across the borders of Scotland and Wales there has been a great increase in the acreage of temporary leys in England. But it is a commonly expressed opinion that our knowledge of how to produce grass has not been matched by knowledge of how to feed it. I think that this is an exaggerated and unduly pessimistic view. While there is undoubtedly much still to be learned about the feeding value of grass and many workers are at present studying it, I think that we have already a great fund of knowledge, and what's more that most of it has been available for the last 10-20 years at least. There is neither the time nor, in view of the reviews by Watson (1939, 1948, 1950), the need for a comprehensive review of the literature, and today I intend to give merely a brief historical review followed by a general statement of current knowledge and finally some comments on matters of interest in current grassland practice.