DAIRY MEETING. 1 73 



happy. I have a brother in Arizona, and he states that the 

 alfalfa crop there is enormous, 20 to 25 tons to the acre. But I 

 fear that with the competition we shall get from those states, we 

 cannot raise alfalfa. Unless there is some method devised, or 

 some alfalfa plant found that we can raise, I fear that the West 

 and the Middle West will defeat us in this line, under the old 

 adage of the ''survival of the fittest." There is no plant that 

 will produce so much food on an acre as alfalfa. 



Our next best hope is the clover crop, and my method with 

 clover, in brief, is this : I sow my corn land to clover along in 

 July, when the corn is well up, sowing nothing but clover. In 

 attempting to raise clover we make this mistake — we sow clover, 

 timothy and red top mixed together. Could we raise corn under 

 those conditions — mixing corn, barley and oats? We do not 

 give the clover a fair chance. Sow the clover alone and give it 

 a chance to grow and get fairly rooted in the ground before the 

 long, cold winter. A year ago last July I sowed five acres in 

 clover in the corn field, and I had a magnificent stand of clover. 

 If you think the clover would fail to make a good stand, sow on 

 a little commercial fertilizer; even 50 or 100 pounds would have 

 a wonderful effect. Try to get it strong and vigorous so it will 

 stand the winters. You remember the severe drought last 

 spring, and how dubious it looked for the State of !Maine. We 

 thought we should not raise any hay, and I made up my mind 

 at that time that, as our Editor of the Maine Farmer has always 

 maintained. Hay is King of the State of Maine, and if the hay 

 •crop should fail for one or two years there would be a famine. 

 But the clover came up well and I had a wonderful crop. I 

 mowed that clover the last of June and the first of July got it 

 in, and a second crop immediately came up, and the second crop 

 was equal to the first. I revolved in my mind the problem 

 whether I had better plow it in or cut it. I concluded that it 

 would be an expensive fertilizer, and I made up my mind that 

 I would turn in a few cows. I picked out 12 Jersey cows, prac- 

 tically fresh cows, and during five weeks I did not feed those 

 12 Jersey cows one spoonful of grain or one bit of food of any 

 kind. They actually got their living on that five acres of clover, 

 and they produced on an average 100 pounds a week. I had 

 5aved quite a feed bill, and I am going to repeat that experiment 



