708 Grasses and Leguminous Crops in New York 



lands of north^central New York — for example in Onondaga 

 county, where, becoming understood, appreciated, and fed in 

 dairying, it has long been, as it is now so conspicuously in the 

 Middle West, the handmaiden of substantial prosperity. 



DEFIES DROUGHT ; ENRICHES THE SOIL 



Defying drought, it grows in portions of the semiarid West 

 with an annual rainfall as scant as 14 inches; while in the Gulf 

 states it flourishes with 65 inches. It gives crops at an elevation 

 of 8,000 feet ; and in the sandy bed of the former Salton Sea of 

 southern California, 60 feet below sea level, it grows, with irriga- 

 tion, to a height of six feet or more, sometimes admitting of nine 

 cuttings a year, aggregating ten to twelve tons. Similar results — 

 exceptional, of course — have been attained without irrigation in 

 the Central West. New York has long grown it in clay and 

 gravel ; Nebraska grows it in her western sand hills, without plow- 

 ing, as does Nevada on her sagebrush deserts. The depleted cotton 

 soils of the South and the rich com lands of Kansas, Missouri, 

 and Illinois respond with profitable yields. The nitrogen it 

 gathers, with the subsoiling it effects, make even the best lands 

 better, while it restores to exhausted soils the priceless elements 

 of which they have been despoiled by a shiftless husbandry. 



The unique characteristic of this plant as a fertilizer is that it 

 gathers nitrogen from the .air. It collects and stores many times 

 as much as the parent crop can use, the surplus being deposited 

 in little nodules on the roots, where it is available to whatever 

 crops may follow. Alfalfa roots by their incredible length reach 

 where no others go ; and, assimilating the mineral elements of the 

 lower subsoils, bring theim to the surface transmuted into mer- 

 chantable commodities. They delve their way downward in every 

 direction, and in the natural processes of decay a part of them are 

 all the time dying. When plowing an alfalfa field, we find the 

 subsoil filled with their decomposing elements, leaving humus far 

 below where it is pushed by any other means, while all the soil 

 is honeycombed to unusual depths with these vegetable pipe lines, 

 through which the rains filter and carry additional fertilization 

 from the surface. They constitute the perfect deep-tilling 



