238 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



Saskatchewan River valley in the Canadian Northwest. In 

 fact, it includes alfalfa at the present time. You will pardon 

 me for this personal reference, but when I wrote that chapter 

 on clover and said that the 49th parallel was about the limit 

 of clover as well as alfalfa I found later on I was wrong. I 

 spent sixteen days in riding over the Canadian Northwest, and 

 when I came back home I had to revise that chapter. I said 

 that the northerly limit of growing clover or alfalfa is north 

 of the Saskatchewan River in the Canadian Northwest, — 

 about four hundred miles north of parallel 49. I simply refer 

 to this, farmers, so that you may be encouraged to believe that 

 you will succeed in growing alfalfa. I think you will find the 

 same to be the case in the State of Connecticut. We are grow- 

 ing it in Minnesota very successfully, where the winters usually 

 are much more severe than they are here. We are not grow- 

 ing it all over Minnesota, and we never will because some of 

 our land is not suited to it, and before I sit down I would like 

 to refer to an experience in growing alfalfa that I had myself. 

 It was on a patch of eleven acres, which was, of course, a little 

 large for an experiment. The patch came up fine. It w^as 

 sown in May, and we cut it off two or three times during 

 quite a wet summer. Some of the cuttings of plants and weeds 

 we allowed to lie as a mulch on the ground, and the plants grew 

 admirably until about the first of September, and then began 

 to wane. When winter fairly set in I said to one of the men 

 to take some of the best rotted manure that he could get in the 

 yard and draw it over the poorest part of the field, and he did 

 so, going over it several times back and forth, and the result 

 was this ; that the next summer there was a magnificent stand 

 of alfalfa where the fertilizer was scattered over the poorest 

 part of the field, and on the other part of the field the plants 

 were more or less sickly, so that they were plowed up. 



Now I am not prepared to say that farmyard manure has 

 the power of giving to alfalfa the ability to draw nitrogen from 

 the air, that is, to draw it from the air without being inocu- 



