ITS WIDE DISTRIBUTION
As the history of alfalfa is traced in the preceding chapter the conclusion is reached that its distribution is not to be circumscribed by any hard and fast lines of climate and soil. It is grown profitably in every country of Europe, in central Asia, its original home, in Australia, the islands of the sea, and in almost every state and territory of the United States, and in Canada. Only two states, Maine and New Hampshire, and only one territory, Alaska, are left wholly in the experimental column. Everywhere else there have been such results as to prove that it ought to become, in greater or less degree, a staple crop on practically every farm, dependent only upon more energy, faith and skill on the part of the farmer, and a natural acclimation. There are several other states such as Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Dakota where the experiment station experts are not fully ready to recommend it as a regular crop for every farm, yet, in each of these there are enterprising farmers who have for years found profit in its raising. The station authorities in Vermont say that success with alfalfa there “depends first on the man, and second on the soil.”
W. R. Dodson, botanist of the Louisiana station, says it is his firm conviction that nothing will contribute so much as alfalfa toward making the southern farm self-supplied with feed for work animals, for the production of dairy products, and home raised meat. “I doubt,” he also says, “if alfalfa does better anywhere outside the irrigated regions of the West than it does in the alluvial lands of Louisiana. We have had as high as eight cuttings in one year, with a total tonnage larger than is had in Kansas or Nebraska, and our annual rainfall is sixty-five inches, or more.”
From Ontario, Canada, comes a report of a yield of four tons to the acre in three cuttings, on a clay hillside; at far-off Medicine Hat, Northwest Territory, it makes a growth pronounced “phenomenal,” and at the experimental farm at Brandon, Manitoba, three cuttings per year are harvested. On a gravelly hill in the District of Columbia, a field was sown in April, 1900. Two crops were cut from it that summer, three in 1901, and the first cutting in 1902 yielded three tons per acre. In southern Minnesota, some thrifty Germans, not knowing that “alfalfa will not grow in Minnesota,” have been raising it since 1872, while others were declaring it impossible. A half-score of men in the sagebrush wilds of Nevada decided to try it, and in 1872 they had 625 prosperous acres, without plowing and without irrigation. J. H. Grisdale, agriculturist of the Central experimental farm at Ottawa, (Bul. No. 46) says, “it is grown in Canada more or less extensively from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is the staple forage plant for winter in the dryer part of British Columbia, and it has been grown in Southern Alberta for many years. It is not much known in Manitoba, but is possible of easy propagation in almost all parts of Ontario. It is, and has been grown long and successfully in Quebec, and is not unknown in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.” In Cape Colony, South Africa, “lucerne can be cut from four to six times in summer and from once to twice in winter, and is the greatest forage plant in the world.” In 1901 the British consul at Buenos Ayres reported alfalfa as covering “an enormous area in Argentina, and every year becoming more important.”