RICH SOILS FOR MEADOWS 253 



book. We must make a beginning somewhere, however, 

 so here at the soil is a good place to set in. 



Give the Meadow Your Best Soil. One can till a 

 rather infertile and hard soil and get fair returns from 

 it because -by tillage one can hold its moisture and lib- 

 erate all the plant food there is; but when one seeds it 

 down to meadow or pasture the tillage ceases, commonly, 

 and there is no way of conserving moisture or creating it 

 unless irrigation is available. It pays well to farm in 

 this way ; to till land as thoroughly as one can, steadily 

 draining and enriching and getting it into the highest 

 state of productivity, all with the one thought toward a 

 final end to get it at last laid down in meadow or pas- 

 ture. There is absolutely no doubt that the greatest 

 profit can come from the meadow some day, when things 

 have been made right and the grasses and clovers are 

 at home. Corn, prodigious though it is, will yield less 

 of food for beast, and, by transfusion, for man, than 

 will alfalfa. Many an acre of Virginia bluegrass is pro- 

 ducing more beef or mutton or horseflesh than the aver- 

 age acre of Illinois coul.d possibly produce. In the Old 

 World men recognize this truth and lay down to per- 

 manent grass or meadows of a few years their best land, 

 meantime keeping under the plow lands not strong 

 enough to be profitable under other treatment. True, 

 there are lands too rough, steep, rocky or infertile for 

 cultivation, and these may be laid down to permanent 

 pasture or devoted to forestry, or a combination of the 

 two secured, and from such land profit may come; yet 

 in the laying down to grass of the best lands will come 

 the greatest profits. Furthermore, the men who steadily 



