No. 6. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 757 



heard it said of spring barley that it is meant to sell and to start 

 alfalfa with. Alfalfa I would say has an intrinsic value. I will 

 show you it has an intrinsic value when I come to measure it. I 

 was talking with a man this morning who raised this year probably 

 200 tons of this hay. I asked why he didn't sell it and buy some 

 clover to put in the place of it. He said, "No, I wouldn't care to do 

 that. I wouldn't make anything by it." I don't know of any fel- 

 low who is a closer figurer than your hired hand. One of my 

 neighbors recently had a hand. He said to him, "If you want some 

 hay, I have some clover hay which you can have at $6 a ton, and I 

 have got some alfalfa which you can have for f 12 a ton." The hand 

 said, "You don't fool me, I will take the alfalfa." He would have 

 been inclined to take the clover if he hadn't thought he was going to 

 get a little more than twice the value. I wouldn't let a man bring 

 to me two tons of clover and take away a ton of fine alfalfa hay for 

 a fattening ration. 



Now, if you will look at the values according to the analysis, they 

 wouldn't be in that ration, but in a fattening ration I want to call 

 your attention to one thing. A food that has |4 worth of food value 

 to the ton to my notion would not be worth much more than half as 

 much as a food that had $6 worth a ton. I don't know, it may be a 

 little bewildering for me to present that in that way, but now, for 

 instance, alfalfa is given at about |9 when clover is worth about |6. 

 But in a fattening ration I don't believe that will work out. As a 

 maintenance ration, I think that perhaps it might if they are equally 

 good. The point I am trying to make is, the ration of lower value 

 burdens the animal. For instance, corn fodder would show an 

 amount of food value probably say three dollars a ton, but you 

 could not fatten an animal if you were to give him ever so many 

 tons of corn fodder. You could not give him enough pounds. I 

 think you get my point. 



Alfalfa has a fertilizing value. It has a mechanical value as a sub- 

 soiler. The roots go way down maybe six, eight, ten or twelve feet. 

 I have seen them five feet the first year's growth. When it is plowed 

 it leaves that soil with little capillaries running down. It has a 

 value in that it adds some organic matter as the clover root does. 

 It has a value as a nitrogen-gatherer with all of the other legumin- 

 ous plants. I suppose that from an acre of alfalfa, from what the 

 Dean over at the University said the other day, if you fed the stuff 

 back on to the land, and would add to that the nitrogen of the soil 

 that you get from an acre of it, you would put on to that soil about 

 $25 worth, taking it at the price at which you buy nitrogen. We 

 have fed this hay to lambs. We fed 1,400 lambs and 100 head of 

 fine sheep at home. I will say to those of you who are Iamb feeders, 

 I have been able to double the weight of the lambs in a period of six 

 months' feeding about two bushels of corn, and what alfalfa hay 

 they would consume, and when I say consume, I mean practically 

 all of it, because we throw out nothing from the racks but some 

 stalks. 



Now, then, I come to the question whether alfalfa can be grown in 

 Pennsylvania. I want to say for your encouragement that some who 

 have tried it in Ohio failed. One of the men over there who tried it 

 was at the college one time, another was the State Experiment 

 Station, and all the agricultural papers and lots of our neighbors 



