2 



all sections of the country. The American has been a grass-killer 

 everywhere. 



Nearly all of our cultivated grasses and clovers are of foreign origin. 

 This is true of red clover, cowpeas, alfalfa, and scarlet clover — the 

 principal leguminous forage plants — and of orchard grass, red-top, 

 timothy, and the rye grasses. Kentucky blue-grass was cultivated in 

 Europe before it was in this country. Almost all of the grasses and 

 clovers in common cultivation came from England or Germany or 

 France or China, or from some place outside our borders. This is not 

 because we do not have just as good or better sorts. The English or 

 the German farmer has to earn a living from land that has been in 

 cultivation for hundreds of years, and whatever he takes out of his soil 

 must first l)e put into it. He is forced to adopt intensive rather than 

 extensive farming. His farm is small. His soil is poor in plant food, 

 though perhaps in the best physical condition ; loose, friable, and well 

 stirred by constant cultivation. This European farmer, with his ex- 

 hausted soil, must compete with the American farmer whose acres are 

 rich with plant food. To do this successfully, the European farmer 

 is prone to try anything and everything that gives promise of pro- 

 ducing the proverbial "two blades of grass where one grew before." 

 He tries the native grasses and clovers that he sees his cattle pick 

 from the hedge rows, to find out what effect cultivation will have 

 upon them ; whether they will, if planted in better soil, increase in 

 size and add some value to" the scant pastures and hay lands. Every 

 weed of the fence corners that upon chemical analysis seems adaptable 

 to cultivation for fodder is cultivated and perfected and improved until 

 it is settled beyond doubt whether it is worthy or worthless. There is 

 no European country whose natural resources, counted in the nurnber 

 of species of nutritious forage plants, equal ours. There are no finer 

 natural meadows and pastures in the world than are to be found in all 

 sections of our land. And yet these natural meadows, which form part 

 of our most valuable resources, are being broken up and destroyed. 

 Our native grasses and clovers are being driven out by foreign species, 

 not through any superiority of digestibility or chemical composition, 

 but because we have not found time to discover whether our own 

 species are not far better suited for our own soil and climatic conditions. 

 Enough money has been spent by American farmers for worthless 

 fodder plants from foreign sources to more than pay the expenses of the 

 whole Dei)artment of Agriculture for one year, with many useful lines 

 of investigation. 



All of the cultivated grasses and clovers of which we know the his- 

 tory have been cultivated in a small way at first. They are mostly 

 species which have a large or conspicuous seed head. These were 

 selected and cultivated mainly because their seeds were large enough to 

 attract attention or because the seed could be easily shelled. Many of 

 the grasses sown in foreign meadows have no value with us, and yet 

 they are persistently advertised and offered for sale here because they are 

 valuable in Germany or in England, on the principle that all things 

 good in agriculture come from foreign lands. We have better species 

 and more of them right here at home, that we will not have to plant 

 ten or twenty years to get acclimated, or to learn whether they will 

 grow in our soils. There are sixty native species of trifolium, the 

 genus to which red clover belongs. There are sixty-five poas, all relatives 

 of Kentucky blue-grass. There are twenty-five grasses closely related 



