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.

The type of mating system we should use in any plan of livestock improvement requires very careful consideration. By reason of the particulate nature of inheritance and the behaviour of chromosomes in the cell divisions preceding the formation of eggs and sperm, the various mating systems differ in their influence upon the uniformity or otherwise of successive generations, the chances of securing improvement, the scope for control by selection, and finally, our ability to discriminate between the relative contributions of genetic and environmental variations to the population variance. Because of the genetic complexity many misconceptions have flourished about what we may expect with different mating systems, about the effects of inbreeding and the advantages and dangers of outbreeding. Different breeders have often secured different results with similar mating systems and the search for a rule of thumb guide has proved fruitless.

Prof. R. G. White prefaced his paper by referring to a letter which had been circulated among the members from Dr. Hugh C. McPhee of the United States Department of Agriculture at Washington. It had been hoped by the Executive Committee that some member of that Department might be in this country at the present time and be able to give an authoritative account of breeding in the United States but unfortunately this proved to be not possible. He would therefore try to lead up to some points brought out in Dr. McPhee's letter and give a short description of some centres at which research was being conducted. Before turning to those parts of the letter which he thought might form the basis of the greater part of their discussion he would venture to offer a few introductory remarks which he hoped would make it easier to appreciate the points brought out by Dr. McPhee.

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.