SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VIII. 775 



The first thing should be to secure a stan.d after providing drainage. 

 Of course that should be the beginning of all agricultural operations. We 

 should have our grass drained, as well as our agricultural land, and 

 if we do not we cannot expect returns. Of course we may get an inferior 

 coarse, rough sort of grass, but it will not be the grass and it will not be 

 the production that we must have from our valuable land today. No 

 man can afford to own valuable land today that is not drained. 



That should be the beginning. Then we ought to go through our 

 grass land and make sure of getting a stand, the very first thing we do. 

 I do not mean that we ought to put a plow in and plow them up regard- 

 less of conditions or what we want to use them for. I want to say 

 emphatically that the best grass land of the world, in all farming 

 countries, is land that has been devoted to grass for centuries. And 

 that will be so in this state. Of course it may be desirable, and will be 

 desirable to rotate a good part of the farm, but if certain portions of the 

 farm can be put into grass and left there permanently, it will be much 

 better than to be continually plowing the pasture land. If our land is 

 lacking a stand in grass, it will not be necessary to put a plow in and 

 plow it up and reseed, to start over again. We can put the disc and 

 harrow in there and give the surface of our pasture land a thorough 

 cutting up; so complete a cutting up that it will look perhaps, as though 

 but little grass remained. But put on, in connection with that, clover 

 and timothy seed, and alsike and we can at once get a stand of grass 

 without in any way disturbing the sod which has been there so long, and 

 which is of such great value in getting the land up to its highest state 

 of production. It will surprise you to see how much this will improve the 

 grass land. 



We have recently made some experiments on the college farm at Ames 

 with blue grass pasture land that was not by any means in a low con- 

 dition. It had been pastured, but kept up in a good state of fertility, 

 but by going on it in the spring, just as soon as the frost was out of the 

 ground, and putting a disc on and cutting it up, and then sowing the 

 grass seed at the rate of two or three pounds per acre, dependent upon 

 the varieties — sometimes as much as five pounds per acre — and following 

 that with the harrow, and then not pasturing too heavily for a time, 

 we have been able to add as much as one hundred per cent to the produc- 

 tive capacity of the soil in the first season, and that advantage will accrue 

 for several seasons to follow. 



It is very easy to add fifty per cent to the grass crop in a single year, 

 by this method. Instead of having grass growing weeds we can have the 

 entire area growing grass. There is never any trouble about weeds in 

 the pastures, if you first have the soil in good condition, and have grass 

 enough to make a good stand. We see weedy pastures all over this 

 country, on the best farms as well as on the poorest, and in nine cases 

 out of ten the sole trouble is that the methods of managing this grass 

 land have been wrong, and the weeds stand is a protest against the 

 farmer's methods. The weeds would not be there if the methods had 

 been right, and if there had been an opportunity for the grass to take 

 possession of the soil. If you give our grasses possession of the rich 



