Introductory
BY
Former Governor W. D. Hoard, of Wisconsin
Editor Hoard’s Dairyman
I am exceedingly gratified by the preparation and publication of a new and larger work devoted to the subject of Alfalfa. The earlier effort by Mr. Coburn upon the same subject was in many respects a classic, and I am sure farmers everywhere will now hail with joy the advent of a kindred work by him, still more complete.
It is strange, this late awakening all over the Union and in Canada to the feeding value and possibilities of this marvelous plant. Again, it is wonderful to me that within a few years farmers everywhere are being compelled to revise their judgment as to their chances of success with it. A large correspondence on this subject comes to me from every state in the Union and the provinces of Canada, and success is being had in the growing of alfalfa where not more than three years ago it was deemed impossible to make it live. Of course the question of growing alfalfa contains a thousand or more chances for good or poor judgment. Men who are not too conceited, too ignorant or too stubborn to learn by reading other men’s experience will go ahead rapidly and soon make a success of it.
I believe this alfalfa movement is the most important agricultural event of the century. For the production of beef, mutton and milk, the combination of corn ensilage and rightly cured alfalfa hay, furnishes almost a perfect ration, requiring but a small addition of grain feed. Both of these can be cheaply and easily produced on nearly every farm in the land. In my herd of nearly fifty registered and grade Guernsey cows these feeds constitute the sheet anchor of my dairy work.
No one more literally abets the growth of two blades of grass where one grew before than he who effectively urges the cultivation of alfalfa upon those who are strangers to it, and no one is more truly working for the benefit of agriculture, the basis of all prosperity, than he who proclaims its excellence as the foremost forage.
Hoard’s Dairyman will do all in its power to enhance the circulation and reading of such a book as Mr. Coburn has made.
W. D. HOARD.
Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.
1906
Publisher’s Announcement
All the plates of the “Book of Alfalfa” were destroyed in the disastrous fire that consumed our mechanical department January 28, 1907. We have taken advantage of this emergency and present the present volume in a new and revised edition, with the additional material furnished by the author.