460 BOAKD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Tu the course of a long residence in a purely agricultural dis- 

 trict I have often been struck with the remarkably healthy appear- 

 • ance and good yield of wheat on land from which a heavy crop of 

 clover hay was obtained in the preceding year. I have likewise 

 had frequent opportunities of observing that, as a rule, wheat 

 grown on part of a field whereon clover has been twice mown for 

 hay is better than the produce of that on the part of the same 

 field on which the clover has been mown only once for hay, and 

 afterwards fed off by sheep. These, observations, extending over 

 a number of years, led me to inquire into the reasons why clover 

 is specially well fitted to prepare laud for wheat, and in the paper 

 which I have now the pleasure of laying before the readers of the 

 Journal, I shall endeavor, as the result of my experiments on the 

 subject, to give an intelligible explanation of the fact that clover 

 is so excellent a preparatory crop for wheat as it is practically 

 known to be. 



By those taking a superficial view of the subject, it may be 

 suggested that any injury likely to be caused by the removal of a 

 certain amount of fertilizing matter is altogether insignificant, and 

 ' more than compensated for by the benefit which results from the 

 abundant growth of clover roots and the physical improvement in 

 the soil which takes place in their decomposition. Looking, how- 

 ever, more closely into the matter, it will be found that in a good 

 crop of clover hay a very considerable amount of both mineral 

 and organic substances is carried off the land, and that if the total 

 amount of such constituents in a crop had to be regarded exclu- 

 sively as the measure for determining the relative degrees in 

 which diflerent farm crops exhaust the land, clover would have 

 to be described as about the most exhausting crop in the entire 

 rotation. 



Clover hay, on an average, and in round numbers, contains in 

 100 parts- 

 Water 17.0 



♦Nitrogenous subi-tanccs (flesh-forming matters) 15. G 



Non-nitrogenous compounds 59.9 



Mineral matter (ash) 7.5 



100.0 

 * Containing nitrogren 2.5 



The mineral portion or ash in 100 parts of clover hay consists of — 



Phosphoric acid 7.5 



Sulphuric acid 4.3 



