LIVE STOCK breeders' ASSOCIATION. l6 



O 



ALFALFA. 



(Joseph E. Wing, Mechanicsburg, Ohio.) 



My interest in alfalfa first began when I was a boy in 1886. I re- 

 member traveling on the train out in Utah, going on a visit to my 

 uncle, and looking out of the window I saw stacks of hay just as green 

 as if they had been painted with green paint. I remember calling to 

 the conductor on the train and asking him what it was. "Why," he 

 says, "that is alfalfa." I asked him what made it look so green. 

 "That's the color of it," he replied. Well, when we got to Salt Lake 

 City we went out early tlie next morning and stumbled on to the hay 

 market. There were great loads of alfalfa standing there just as 

 green as could be. I went up to them and chewed up some of the hay 

 to see what it tasted like. That's my test to see if the cattle and sheep 

 will like a thing or not ; it's a good test — don't be afraid to try it. Well, 

 that alfalfa I ate tasted good and I said, "Joe Wing, you have struck 

 the best country in the world. If you ever get hard up, just go out to 

 those hay stacks and help yourself." I remember my uncle .had a big 

 milk cow which he fed on alfalfa; she was extremely wide out and 

 able to eat a whole barrel of alfalfa and drink a tub of water at one time, 

 and the amount of milk she gave was wonderful. And it was from 

 that old cow that I gained my first impressions of the value of alfalfa 

 as a feed and there that I learned to grow it. We fed alfalfa to our 

 hogs and finished them ofif with a few nubbins of corn ; we fed it to our 

 horses. Bought some of the seed and sent it home to father — about a 

 pound I guess. After I had been out there for two years I went home, 

 and after I had seen father and mother, I wanted to know where that 

 alfalfa was. "Why," father said, "its back here but it is not worth 

 going to see." "It did not do any good here ; it may be a great thing 

 out west, but red clover is the thing for our country." Well, he took 

 me back there where the alfalfa had been sown and it looked pretty 

 shabby to me when I first saw it; was not more than three of four 

 inches high and there were hardly any leaves on it. I stood there 

 looking at it for a long time, and while I was looking at it I saw m) 

 mother's chickens come along and pick off each leaf. An idea came 

 to me and I went and got a tub full of water. My father said, "What 

 are you going to do?" I told him I was going to show him how they 

 irrigated in Utah. I poured this water slowly on one plant; I jerked 

 the top off of a barrel and set it on the alfalfa plant and went away 



