“Its long, branching roots penetrate far down, push and crowd the earth this way and that, and thus constitute a gigantic subsoiler. These become an immense magazine of fertility. As soon as cut, they begin to decay and liberate the vast reservoir of fertilizing matter below the plow, to be drawn upon by other crops for years to come.”
The Author’s Foreword
This volume, however strong its statements in favor of alfalfa may appear to those unacquainted with that plant’s productivity and beneficence, is by no means presented as an argument that everyone should raise alfalfa. It is intended rather as a conservative setting forth of what others have found alfalfa to be and do under wide variations of soil, climate, condition and locality; of its characteristics and uses; the most approved methods of its raising and utilization, and the estimates of it by those who have known it most intimately and longest as a farm forage crop and a restorer and renovator of the soil.
The author believes in alfalfa; he believes in it for the big farmer as a profit-bringer in the form of hay, or condensed into beef, pork, mutton, or products of the cow; but he has a still more abiding faith in it as a mainstay of the small farmer; for feed for all his live stock and for maintaining the fertility of the soil.
To avoid the appearance of both special pleading and exaggeration the statements have been guarded, and many of a laudatory nature, which fully authenticated facts seemed to justify, have been omitted, as neither the author nor the publishers have desire or willingness to extol unduly a commodity so little needing it as that of which the volume treats. Alfalfa’s strongest commendations are invariably from those who know it best; none are incredulous who know it well, and none have grown it but wished their acreage increased.
F. D. COBURN.
Topeka, Kansas.
1906