^12 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



one-half that. With the clover you do fairly well if you get two 

 crops ; with the alfalfa you can safely get three crops. The aver- 

 age production with me is over five tons per acre; the average 

 production of clover is rarely more than two tons to two and a half 

 tons per acre. These facts will answer your question. The feed- 

 ing value of alfalfa is wonderful, wonderful. I have for several 

 years kept my brood sows, from the time they were shut up in the 

 fall until they farrowed in the sring, on nothing but alfalfa hay. 

 I, like most of you farmers, found myself confronted with a great 

 loss of young pigs, they were becoming weak and seemed to have 

 very little hold on life. I began to reason on this thing, and tried 

 to reason back to the roots of the thing. I found first that every 

 little pig is a mass of protein. The original protoplasm is protein 

 and so on up until you come to this little pig, and that mother is 

 called on to produce from six to ten little bodies of protein and 

 the farmer is not wise enough to give her the material to make 

 it from, he gives her carbonaceous food, gives her corn, and 

 the result is that the little fellows are weak, have not a strong 

 hold pn life. I changed this and my foreman was scared about 

 it, said the sows were starved. I went away to Texas and he 

 used to write me every week and finally wrote me and said, 

 "I am astonished at the way the sows have thrived. They ate 

 their ration of alfalfa every day and was given their drink, which 

 consisted mainly of water ; if there was a surplus of skim milk they 

 got that but there was not much with all the calves and small pigs 

 to feed. Those sows went through ; that was my first year feeding 

 alfalfa, and they gave me seventy-eight pigs; I reared seventy-five, 

 fattened them and sold them, and from that day to this every fall I 

 put my brood sows upon that ration and I have the strongest, most 

 vigorous little fellows that I have ever had in my experience. So 

 much for the feeding power of this forage, and everyi;hing eats it. 

 Why, my hens are in the alfalfa meadow all the summer long pick- 

 ing alfalfa leaves and they are very fond of the leaves that are 

 brushed off on the bam floor. If you take them and soak them 

 until they are soft the hens will eat that alfalfa leaf. These things 

 are given to us, as Paul says, for our understanding and I find my- 

 self a most earnest student of them because they are worth a lot to 

 me aside from their financial value. 



Mr. Nichols : Are there not some of the alfalfa growers in Wis- 

 consin that have alfalfa seed for sale? 



Gov. Hoard: No alfalfa seed is grown this side of the Rocky 

 Mountains. 



