“When the alfalfa half-acre was plowed and planted to wheat it produced $8 to $12 more value in wheat per acre than the land which had grown potatoes and grain before.
“When the alfalfa half-acre was plowed and planted to oats it produced $16 worth of grain more than land which had grown potatoes and grain before.
“When the alfalfa half-acre was plowed and planted to potatoes it gave $16 worth more of potatoes per acre than was obtained from land which had grown potatoes and grain before.
“By growing alfalfa the increase of yields and values were produced with absolutely no cost for fertilizing the land.”
This gain, it will be noted, cost nothing in the way of fertilization, as the alfalfa had every year been more profitable than the other crops. A Marion county, Kansas, manager of large estates reports that a field of wheat after alfalfa averaged forty bushels per acre while an adjoining field of equal original fertility averaged but fifteen bushels. These results have been duplicated in innumerable instances where alfalfa fields have been plowed and planted to other crops. A Colorado man who farms 1000 acres, with 200 acres of it in alfalfa, says he cannot afford not to plow his alfalfa after he has had from it four years’ crops; that it is necessary to maintain the general farm fertility and obtain big crops of corn, oats and potatoes. In the potato districts of Colorado alfalfa is used systematically as a rotation to maintain the yields and quality of their potatoes, both of which are so famous.
In the corn belt, which may be said to extend from the central meridian of Kansas to Pennsylvania, alfalfa used in rotation will do much to prevent the disgrace of raising an average of but twenty or twenty-five bushels of corn to the acre. And so in what were once famous wheat belts, alfalfa will restore the crop records, if properly used in a rotation.
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.”