This paper in the main deals with the work carried out on the lands of the Cahn Hill Improvement Scheme and also with work carried out by W.A.E.C.s’ and on individual farms in Wales.

This work was started by Sir George Stapledon and his colleagues at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station. Mr. Stapledon, as he then was, made a survey of the hinterland of North Cardigan soon after taking up the post of Adviser in Agricultural Botany at Aberystwyth and conceived the idea that there was great scope for improvement on these lands. When he was appointed Director of the W.P.B.S. he and some of his colleagues started small-scale trials at Llety and Bwlch-rosser and afterwards on Captain Bennett Evans’ farms.

I feel that I have rather a difficult task this afternoon, because there are not many things that I can disagree with in Mr. Moses Griffith’s paper, since we in Montgomeryshire learnt the fundamental things of land reclamation from Cahn Hill, although we think of course that we improved on them in some detail! However, our general methods were what Mr. Griffith finally put into practice at Cahn Hill.

In Montgomeryshire we tackled about 6,000 acres. It was not all directly reseeded, but all was hill land classified as rough grazing. The land fell into three types: Molinia, Nardus and Bracken. Each of these types of vegetation clearly relate to three different soil types. Molinia is wet, heavy clay; Bracken is dry, loam overlying shale; while Nardus comes somewhere between the two.