280 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



pends. In fact, I have gotten so used to making good pea vine 

 baj that it seems to me abont the easiest hay made. And yet, nine 

 men out of ten all over the South will tell vou that the great draw- 

 back to the pea hay making is the great difiiculty in curing it. Last 

 summer we had a series of institutes in the western Piedmont 

 country of North Carolina. I invited the farmers when they came 

 to attend the State Fair at Kaleigh to step across the field adjoin- 

 ing the fair ground and look at the hay made as I advised. Our 

 Commissioner of Agriculture, who was with the party, said that 

 I was taking a heavy risk, as the hay was yet to be made. I told 

 him not to fear, and when the fair came on I had the pleasure 

 of showing the hay to more than one doubter. I enter into these 

 details because there are a great many locations in this State 

 where the hay can be profitably made and used. But the greatest 

 use here for the cow pea, and the great use it will be in the greater 

 part of the Middle states is as a fertilizing crop direct. No matter 

 if the season is too short for the peas to ripen, the dead vines will 

 bring more humus-making material on the soil at a slight cost 

 than you could haul there for years in manure, and it will be gotten 

 there in a very short time. In sections where the hay can be se- 

 cured I do not consider it good farm economy to use so valuable a 

 food crop simply as manure, but where it cannot be matured for 

 hay it is well worth growing as a fertilizing and humus-making crop. 

 Another fact in regard to the cow pea is worth relating. A farmer 

 in Illinois wrote to me that he had a field of peas caught by frost 

 and killed before maturing. He turned a bunch of cattle on dead 

 pea vines^aud they got fat on them before the snow came. Where 

 the vines do not mature for hay they can be protitabl}' fed off after 

 they are killed. 



For the farmer in the Middle states then, the cow pea comes in 

 as a catch crop to take plac(,^ which a failure of clover has left 

 vacant; as a means for providing a summer pasture to tide over a 

 drought that makes the grass short and worthless, for it will 

 flourish under droughty conditions when most other plants fail; 

 as a plant to put in the hog lots and make cheap pork, and finally 

 as a plant to gather nitrogen from the air and restore hunius to 

 the soil even where it fails to ripen seed. Then, too, as a pasture 

 where it has failed to mature and dead vines are still valuable food 

 on the ground. 



While the cow pea can never attain in (he ^liddle states the im- 

 portance it does in the "Sunny South," where it more than takes the 

 place of clover, there are still many ways in which the Middle states' 

 farmer can use the pea at times to great advantage, though it must 

 always be regarded as supplementary to clover, and by no means 

 as a crop that can supplement Llie hardy perennial legumes like 



