EIGHTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART VII. 313 



Mr. Nichols: lou prefer sowing your nurse crop around the 

 Arst of August? 



Gov. Hoard : That depends on your latitude. The latest I have 

 ever sown was when I took off a crop of canning peas for the can- 

 ning factory and sowed the first of July; they barely struggled 

 through, but I understand from Mr. "Wallace that you can sow here 

 in August very favorably. You can grow alfalfa all over Iowa. 



Mr. Haugdahl: What is the nature of your soil? 



Gov. Hoard : A heavy clay on my farm fifty feet deep. Heavy 

 clay and hard gravel. I have followed the alfalfa root down twelve 

 feet. 



jMember: How long will you let the field grow alfalfa before 

 you take it off? 



Gov. Hoard: June grass gets in in six years; my rotation is a 

 five-year rotation. Two years ago we had a very severe ice storm 

 in ]\Iarch and it killed the clover and killed the alfalfa except the 

 new seeding. I had about eight acres of new seeding that went 

 through. "Why I don't know. 



Mr. Nichols: Will you tell the cause of blight in alfalfa in 

 Iowa, as sometimes occurs? 



Gov. Hoard : I think it is usually due to a lack of the bacterial 

 content in the soil of Iowa. 



Mr. Nichols: I put some bacteria in the soil but it blighted. 



The Chairman: We have with us another student of alfalfa 

 that wants to say just a word. Uncle Henry Wallace will say a few 

 words to us and then we will close this discussion. 



Henry Wallace: Governor Hoard has told you he traced the 

 roots of alfalfa down fifteen feet, but that is nothing like the story 

 I heard in Kansas. I was there one day and heard one man say he 

 tracked it down thirty feet along an old well, another sixty feet, 

 another 129 feet 6 inches, and they asked me what I knew about it, 

 and I said I knew nothing but I had been over in Europe that sum- 

 mer and called at Lord Roseberry's place and saw the finest piece 

 of alfalfa I had ever seen. I asked what that would yield and was 

 told 650 bushels to the acre. On the way back I fell in with an 

 Irishman and asked him to give me the four different meanings of 

 the word aye. "Aye — I believe; aye, I am surprised; aye, I am 

 astonished; aye — I am something of a liar myself." 



But what I rose to say was this, Governor Hoard lives in Wiscon- 

 sin and most of us live in Iowa, and on account of the quack grass 



