AN OPINION FROM HEADQUARTERS
As a latter day opinion or estimate of alfalfa from an official who is presumed to speak as an authority, without bias and knowing his subject, the words of W. J. Spillman, agrostologist of the United States Department of Agriculture, should carry weight. In an address before the eleventh annual convention of the National Hay Association, at St. Louis, in 1904, Professor Spillman said:
“Alfalfa is the oldest plant known to man; it is the most valuable forage plant ever discovered. It has not been appreciated in the eastern part of the United States until the last five years. We are now growing it successfully in every state in the Union, and I believe it is safe to say in every agricultural county in the United States it is being grown with success. Two weeks ago I secured a picture of a field of alfalfa in South Carolina that was sowed over sixty-nine years ago. It was still in pretty good condition. I know of another field in New York State sowed forty-five years ago, and one in Minnesota that was sowed thirty-three years ago. All over the West there are thousands of fields of alfalfa that were sowed twenty-five years ago that are still yielding large crops. In Wisconsin alfalfa yields three crops of hay a year, and in Texas, four and five large crops. In southern California, below sea-level, where they never have any frost, they cut alfalfa eleven times a year, and in Texas, south of the Rio Grande, they cut it nine times a year.
“Alfalfa does not exhaust the soil. Nitrogen is the soil’s most important element, and the one most liable to give out; the one the farmer is called upon to supply first. Alfalfa does not ask the farmer for nitrogen at all, because it can get its nitrogen out of the atmosphere. Four-fifths of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen. Ordinarily, plants cannot make use of that nitrogen at all; the roots of the alfalfa will leave in the soil eight or ten times as much nitrogen as was there before. The farmer who plants alfalfa, clover or peas does not have to get nitrogen from the fertilizer factories. I know one farmer who for the past eight years has made an average of eight and one-half tons per acre of alfalfa on irrigated land in the state of Washington. I have heard of other men that produced twelve tons an acre in southern Texas on irrigated land. It would hardly be possible to produce that much on land that is not irrigated, because rain does not come to order.
“I have lived ten years in a country where the horses, cattle, sheep, hogs and chickens eat alfalfa hay, or green alfalfa, the year round. It is the richest hay food known. Eleven pounds of it is worth as much for feeding purposes as ten pounds of bran.”
A most pleasing word-picture of alfalfa is that by Geo. L. Clothier, M. S., who has studied his subject closely in the field, the feed lot and the laboratory, and he paints it thus:
“The cultivation and feeding of alfalfa mark the highest development of our modern agriculture. Alfalfa is one of nature’s choicest gifts to man. It is the preserver and the conserver of the homestead. It is peculiarly adapted to a country with a republican government, for it smiles alike on the rich and the poor. It does not fail from old age. It loves the sunshine, converting the sunbeams into gold coin in the pockets of the thrifty husbandman. It is the greatest mortgage lifter yet discovered.
“The alfalfa plant furnishes the protein to construct and repair the brains of statesmen. It builds up the muscles and bones of the war-horse, and gives his rider sinews of iron. Alfalfa makes the hens cackle and the turkeys gobble. It induces the pigs to squeal and grunt with satisfaction. It causes the contented cow to give pailsful of creamy milk, and the Shorthorn and white-faced steers to bawl for the feed rack. Alfalfa softens the disposition of the colt and hardens his bones and muscles. It fattens lambs as no other feed, and promotes a wool clip that is a veritable golden fleece. It compels skim-milk calves to make gains of two pounds per day. It helps the farmer to produce pork at a cent and a half a pound and beef at two cents.
“Alfalfa transforms the upland farm from a sometime waste of gullied clay banks into an undulating meadow fecund with plant-food. It drills for water, working 365 days in the year without any recompense from man. The labor it performs in penetrating the subsoil is enormous. No other agricultural plant leaves the soil in such good physical condition as alfalfa. It prospects beneath the surface of the earth and brings her hidden treasures to the light of day. It takes the earth, air, moisture and sunshine, and transmutes them into nourishing feed stuffs and into tints of green and purple, and into nectar and sweet perfumes, alluring the busy bees to visits of reciprocity, whereon they caress the alfalfa blossoms, which, in their turn, pour out secretions of nectar fit for Jupiter to sip. It forms a partnership with the micro-organisms of the earth by which it is enabled to enrich the soil upon which it feeds. It brings gold into the farmer’s purse by processes more mysterious than the alchemy of old. The farmer with a fifty-acre meadow of alfalfa will have steady, enjoyable employment from June to October; for as soon as he has finished gathering the hay at one end of the field it will be again ready for the mower at the other. The homes surrounded by fields of alfalfa have an esthetic advantage unknown to those where the plant is not grown. The alfalfa meadow is clothed with purple and green and exhales fragrant, balmy odors throughout the growing season to be wafted by the breezes into the adjacent farmhouses.”
Intergrading Types of Seed Between Alfalfa and Sweet Clover
The six seeds to the left being alfalfa, the five to the right Sweet clover. Magnified eight diameters
Seeds of the Weed Known as Buck-horn
Ribbed plantain, English plantain, or Rib-grass, (Plantago lanceolata). Very commonly present in alfalfa seed, especially that of European origin A bad weed. Magnification five diameters
Alfalfa Seeds Magnified Five Diameters
Note the characteristic angular point at one end, typical of alfalfa. The kidney-shaped type, as in “a” is also characteristic. The rounded type “b” is rare, and resembles Sweet clover. Seeds marked “c” and “d” resemble Yellow trefoil in the projecting “beak”