SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VIII. 777 



accustomed during the winter season. The very sight of green grass and 

 the smell of it takes away the appetite for hay and fodder and every- 

 thing else except silage, which furnishes the succulence. 



The farmer can't afford to turn these cattle into his meadows. He 

 therefore needs a permanent pasture. There is a perceptible decrease 

 in the gain of cattle when they are changed from grain to grass. It ordi- 

 narily takes nearly a month to get them adapted to the new diet. This 

 time, however, can be very much shortened if the farmer has a permanent 

 pasture which has not been too closely grazed during the winter, but 

 which has more or less dead grass through which the green grass is 

 coming up. Cattle eat both together. The dead grass prevents scour- 

 ing, and they are ready to shed and get down to their summer work a 

 month earlier than they would on dry feed. They thus gradually 

 become accustomed to the new conditions, which frequently means a 

 hundred pounds additional gain on a steer during the summer season. 



The reason why the greatest variety of grasses should be sown in the 

 permanent pasture is because no one grass is good during the entire 

 season. What is needed is as nearly as possible a constant succession of 

 bloom. In the timber sections south of central Iowa orchard grass should 

 be an ingredient in the permanent pasture; and in fact in all sections 

 where it is known to do well. This grass furnishes the earliest bite. 

 It also makes a more rapid growth than any other grass duriug the 

 dry season of July and August. It is at its best at the time when red 

 clover is at its best, and from ten days to two weeks before timothy Is 

 at its best. Therefore orchard grass should be sown in small lots in 

 every permanent pasture in localities where it is known to do well. It 

 has its faults. It persists in growing in tussocks, one plant graudally 

 producing fifty or a hundred stems. It therefore can't form a sod and 

 hence should never be sown alone, and never with clover alone except 

 •where it is intended for meadow. 



No permanent pasture should be without a liberal sowing of blue 

 grass. Blue grass is the one plant which winter never injures and which, 

 ■withstands the driest summer where treated half way right. It is impos- 

 sible to kill it by neglect and only the most atrocious treatment can per- 

 manently injure it. Blue grass, however, has its faults. It starts early 

 in the spring, four or five days after orchard grass. In the latitude of 

 central Iowa it matures its seed in the last half of June, is at its best 

 three weeks before red clover. Then it stops growing except in the 

 wettest seasons. In fact, seldom does anything till the fall rains set in; 

 but it makes phenomenal growth in blades and keeps on growing until 

 after every other plant has closed up its business for the season, remains 

 green under the snow and makes an early growth in the spring. It ia 

 not a soil enricher like the clover, for the reason that it is dependent 

 on the soil for its supply of nitrogen. It enriches the soil to the extent 

 of its root development; or to be more accurate, to the extent to which it 

 supplies humus, but to no greater extent. 



Some grass must therefore be supplied for permanent pasture that 

 will occupy the time of the land during the months of July and August, 

 and that will also furnish nitrogen for the blue grass and timothy. For 



