NECESSITY

IMPROVEMENT

FOR

181. Thus, when we come to examine the advice given by so many witnesses that provision should be made for OF extending grazing areas for the purpose of improvEXISTING GRAZING ing cattle, we find that no large additions are possible; there is no need, therefore, to examine the contention of other witnesses who stated that an extension of grazing areas would, in existing conditions, merely aggravate the evil which it was sought to cure.

RESOURCES.

It follows that, since relief cannot be found by adding to the area of grazing lands, efforts should be concentrated on measures likely to increase the usefulness of the land already growing grass. Although the difficulties in this direction which confront the seeker after improvement are formidable, the scope for an increase in the production of cattle food is undoubtedly very great. The principal methods of improving the output of cattle food from grass land mentioned by witnesses restriction of the right of grazing on waste land, enclosure and controlled grazing, and fodder storage.

CULTIVATORS.

were

182. It is frequently asserted that the difficulties of cultivators are intensified by the extent to which landless villagers CATTLE OF NON- and residents in towns keep cattle but do not feed them. Such cattle not only compete with those of cultivators on the common grazing lands but, at times of the year when these afford no food, raid crops and cause much damage. In some localities, this evil is found to such an extent that legislation was suggested with the object of restricting the numbers of cattle kept. Where common rights exist in the village grazing grounds, it would probably be impracticable to restrict the keeping of cattle to occupiers of tillage land; but, with the consent of a majority, it should be possible to regulate the grazing on the common land, if enabling Acts were in force giving, to a majority of those who have rights in such lands, power to make regulations laying down the number and description of animals which could be turned out to graze by individual villagers. In cases in which grazing rights are of an indefinite kind, and especially where the area of grazing land attached to a village is considerable, it should further be possible to divide up the grazing land so that a co-operative society of villagers wishing to improve their cattle might secure entire control of a part of the grazing lands, leaving the balance available for common use.

REGULATION

GRAZING.

OF

183. Conditions in India vary so widely that no one policy or method of meeting the difficulties created by the keeping of cattle by non-cultivators, or by the overstocking of grazing lands for other reasons, would be applicable throughout the country. We propose, therefore, to examine three typical sets of conditions which are likely to be met with frequently, and to suggest the lines along which the obstacles to cattle improvement presented by each set might be attacked. In the first, the village common lands represent little more than exercising grounds for cattle, and little, if anything, can be done to improve the grazing they provide, for every grass plant is gnawed bare as soon as it begins to make fresh leaves and is given no

chance of producing the herbage which, under more favourable conditions, it would supply. In such circumstances, the extra fodder which cattle need must be grown on the cultivated land, or must be imported from outside. In the second type of village, a type which is very frequently met with throughout the plains of India, the grazing area is more extensive, and the cattle are able to pick and choose their food during the monsoon, with the result that much grass develops into coarse dry fodder of very little feeding value. Here a great improvement could be effected by grazing the area in rotation, and in order to secure that this is done, authority must be conferred on some group of villagers, a panchayat, or a co-operative society, for example, which would enable them to regulate grazing. The third set of conditions which we have in mind is that which is found in hilly districts such as are common in Assam and Burma. The conditions we have described immediately above occur here in a more pronounced form. Grass is so abundant in the rainy season and grows so strongly that the dry season finds extensive tracts covered with fodder which is not only uneaten, but uneatable. Such districts differ from those in the plains in that the extension of free grazing areas would be possible; but extension would be of little or no use in improving cattle. We recommend that an attempt should be made to demarcate those areas likely to be most suitable for grazing, and to assign them to groups of occupiers of tillage land at nominal rates, on condition that they graze the land in rotation, exclude cattle not owned by the group, and cut grass from part of the area for use in the hot season. What should, in fact, be aimed at is the creation throughout the dry season of oases of grazing grounds of real value in the existing deserts of dry, coarse and valueless herbage.

66

The subject of regulating grazing lands has hitherto received but little close study from the Agricultural Department; but, since the report of the Bombay Cattle Committee of 1923, attention has been paid to it in certain talukas of that presidency. It is mainly from forest officers that we have heard of the importance of regulating grazing grounds. The Chief Conservator in the United Provinces, for example, emphasised the fact that the produce of unreserved waste lands could be greatly increased by protection, and he suggested that, if such areas were divided into blocks and grazed in rotation, the existing difficulties would be much reduced. Other forest officers pointed out that even extensive forest tracts were, in some cases, over-grazed, and the Chief Conservator of Bengal explained how this might occur through neglect of rotational grazing in forests where the total amount of fodder is sufficient. In referring to the deterioration of forests through excessive grazing, he observed "what appears to be light grazing in terms of the head of cattle per acre is, in practice, concentrated near the village, in stream beds and grassy blocks; the last two being just where it does most harm. We are well aware of the difficulties likely to be met with in practice in getting owners of cattle to adopt more rational methods in utilising the diminishing grazing areas of India, but the poverty of so large a proportion of the breeding herds of the country is such a serious handicap to the improvement of agriculture,

and the management of the available grazing lands is so bad, that a great effort to alter existing conditions is necessary, and is indeed long overdue.

In this connection, attention may again be called to professional graziers. Two kinds are to be found in India. One is represented by the villager to whose care cultivators in many districts hand over their cattle at the end of the busy season. This type is to be found in those districts in which the poorest animals are kept. The men belonging to it are cattle herdsmen rather than graziers and need no encouragement. The other type is found in the tribes of nomadic graziers, themselves in the past owners of herds of cattle an breeders of the best that India could show. As cattle breeders, they have disappeared from many districts in the course of the past half century; in others they still exist, but are losing ground. These men possess a knowledge of cattle that would make them useful allies in any fresh attempts to make better use of the natural grazings of the country; and, where they are still to be found, efforts are required to enlist their hereditary skill. Special consideration, which might take the form of allotting them new grazing areas from disafforested reserves, or from waste land not classed as free grazing areas, should be shown to them in all schemes for cattle improvement.

One further point may be referred to in connection with the better utilisation of existing grazing lands. In some parts of India, there may be considerable tracts of grass land which are not being fully utilised for a reason which might be remedied. The Bombay Cattle Committee drew attention to an instance of this kind. They pointed out that, in the Satpura tract, there exists much good grass which is of little value to stock because, during the dry season, there is no drinking water, and suggested that an irrigation engineer should examine the tract in order to ascertain whether a remedy was possible. The difficulties in providing a sufficient water supply may prove insuperable; but the quantity of water required by grazing stock is not considerable as compared with the amount that an irrigation officer is normally expected to provide, and the water supply of natural grazing lands is a subject well worth investigation. It is not unlikely that much of the unequal grazing of which forest officers complain may be associated with a difficulty in finding water for cattle near at hand.

184. We turn now to the subject of fodder storage. Indian hay is seldom "hay" in the sense in which that term is DRY FODDER STORAGE. understood in western countries; it consists of dry grass, on which seed has ripened and usually has been shed. It corresponds in feeding quality to the straw of cereals rather than to hay made before seed has ripened. The reason for this inferior condition is that, during the latter part of the monsoon season, when grass is ready to be cut for hay, the weather is often so wet that hay-making cannot be attempted; and, at the end of the monsoon, when there is still a chance of making fair hay from grass not greatly over-ripe, cultivators are very busy with their cultivated crops. Thus the would-be hay-maker of India

has greater difficulties to face than have farmers in even the wettest parts of Britain. It is only in districts of exceptionally light rainfall that the weather is not a serious obstacle to hay-making in India, and unfortunately in such districts there is little natural hay to be made.

These difficulties, and the quality of the material that passes for hay, largely explain the attitude of the Indian cultivator to hay-making. It is an attitude that may have been reasonable enough in the distant past, when his theory of agriculture took shape; but it is an attitude which is no longer reasonable, for even dried grass, though seldom better, and usually worse than the bhusa and kadbi on which he relies, is of much value to hungry cattle, and, if supplemented by concentrated foods, would bring them through the dry season in good condition. Nor is it always impossible for the cultivator to make real hay. If he used his opportunities as diligently as, for example, the Welsh farmer does, his cattle would quickly improve. In all districts where grass land is abundant, cultivators should be expected to provide themselves, if not with hay, at least with dried grass; and even where grass land, without being abundant, exists in excess of the needs of cattle during the period from July to November, a portion of the land now used as grazing would be used to better purpose if it were reserved for grass cutting.

GREAT POSSIBILITIES OF SILAGE.

The evidence we have heard suggests that the cultivator rarely makes the most of his opportunities for grass cutting, and that it is very seldom indeed, that he secures the full value of the grass which he cuts, by harvesting it when its feeding value is good. It is not that he is unaware of the poor quality of over-ripe grass. This he knows well, and his objection to baled hay made in the forests is that its quality is so poor as to render it useful only in famine conditions. The most formidable obstacle to be overcome before the cattle owner can be induced to provide hay for his stock is, indeed, to be found neither in lack of sunshine, nor in surplus of shower, but in custom. A grass cutter he has been, but a hay-maker never; and he finds it hard to begin. 185. It is a fortunate circumstance, however, that sunshine is not essential to the process of storing good fodder, and within the past few years, since livestock experts have been appointed and the improvement of cattle has received their thought, much attention has been given to the subject of ensilage. A great many trials of different types of silo have been made, and the suitability of many different crops for filling them has been tested. The making of silage is, indeed, no new process in India. It has been regularly practised at Hissar ever since, in 1899, this farm was taken over from the Commissariat Department. At Pusa also, silage has always been an important fodder; but it is within the last ten years that interest in the subject has become widespread. The results of this widened interest in one respect have been more than encouraging, for very definite success has been achieved. On many government farms all over the country, silage is now regularly made and has proved of great value in feeding cattle during the dry season. In another respect, however, the results so far met with have been disappointing, inasmuch

as cultivators, though not the cattle, show a great disinclination to take to silage. Around Pusa, for example, where silage has been made for more than a dozen years, where the stock are largely fed on it, and where cultivators have had many opportunities, at the annual sales of cattle, of seeing the excellence of animals fed on silage, they themselves will not touch it. Elsewhere, agriculturists have been less conservative, and a few large landowners have begun to use silage. Some of the zamindars who gave evidence before us testified from personal experience to its value; and the ensiling of crops seems now to be commonly resorted to by the small number of progressive dairy farmers who have begun to keep herds in rural surroundings for the supply of milk to large towns.

The experiments made in all parts of the country show that, except where the soil is waterlogged, the cheapest form of silo, viz., the earthen pit, is also the type best suited for cultivators. When properly constructed, filled and weighted, it keeps silage as well as, if not better than, the tower silo built of brick or concrete, and though there are objections to pits when silage in large quantities is made, these objections are of little account when silage on the scale needed by cultivators is the object. If the cultivator wishes to store his fodder, therefore, there is no initial outlay; he has merely to dig a pit of suitable dimensions. Experiments made in Bombay show that, for each foot of its length, a pit dug eight feet wide at the surface, seven feet wide at the bottom, and eight feet deep would hold about one ton of green fodder and produce about fivesixths of a ton of good silage. Thus, a pit with the above cross section and ten feet long would hold all the silage that a cultivator, owning three or four cattle, would be likely to need for the purpose of bringing his stock through the hot season in good condition.

The choice of plants suitable for ensiling is a wide one, and investigators in India have already recorded the results of their experiments with a large number of products. Among cultivated crops, maize, juar and oats are specially suitable. There is some advantage in cutting such fodders into short lengths before ensiling them, and in demonstrations of the process in the Central Provinces, a motor lorry with a silage cutter driven by a 3-H. P. engine has been successfully employed. Several coarse grasses, such as Sorghum halepense, Panicum antidotale and Andropogon contortus have also been found to make satisfactory silage. The last of these is the common spear-grass which, when dry, is a very poor cattle food, but has been found to be much improved in palatability and feeding value by ensiling. At this stage of development, the prudent course when recommending the use of ensilage is to assume that only recognised fodders, readily eaten by cattle when fresh, or those inferior grasses which experiments have proved suitable, can profitably be ensiled. Leaves of trees and strong growing weeds of various kinds can be converted into useful silage, and many suitable plants are likely to be found, but, with so large a selection of plants which can undoubtedly be used with good results, the immediate policy should be to concentrate on efforts to get the cultivator to make silage of these, for his cows and young stock.