ROTATION A NECESSITY
Some experiment station men insist that where alfalfa is allowed to stand for many years it will cease to have a fertilizing value; that alfalfa draws heavily on the potash and phosphoric acid in the soil, and will after, say, eight or ten years begin to deplete it of these important elements. Therefore they insist that alfalfa should not be allowed to stand for over six or eight years unless it is given an annual top-dressing of manure. They favor plowing up the alfalfa after about five years and cropping to corn or cotton.
Former Governor Hoard in speaking of the value of alfalfa as compared with that of clover in a crop rotation says that, “alfalfa having a much larger root development goes deeper down, thoroughly subsoils the ground, brings up phosphorus and potash from the lower strata, and leaves much more vegetable matter to decay and furnish humus. Nothing else we have ever tried equals alfalfa for putting the soil in good tilth.”