444 Kansas State Board of Agriculture. 



shelled corn, straw, pea-vine hay, and even the finer seeds, such as 

 millet, cane or broom-corn seed. 



It seems reasonable to predict that within a few years every progress- 

 ive farmer will find it desirable to use some such grinder in connection 

 with his feeding activities, though the writer does not believe it will ever 

 become a common practice for him to haul his alfalfa hay to a mill in 

 town several miles distant and have it ground into meal which must be 

 hauled back to the farm, even if it might prove profitable in certain 

 feeding operations. 



Returning to a consideration of the commercial alfalfa mill, which 

 depends upon distant, not local, territory for its market, not only is it be- 

 ing located farther west in the alfalfa-producing territory, in Colorado, 

 Utah, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and even California, 

 but quite as radical a change has occurred of recent years in the methods 

 of marketing the product. The early efforts of the millers who put out 

 only a straight alfalfa meal were directed quite as largely toward creat- 

 ing a demand among the small feed-consuming trade as among the large 

 manufacturers of concentrated feeds. The efforts in the first-mentioned 

 direction were disappointing, since the individual feeder did not under- 

 stand the best methods of feeding the meal, nor were there many millers 

 who could or did tell him how. 



The meal, which is very dusty, should properly be mixed with ground 

 grain or molasses for best results, and often too much of it was given by 

 inexperienced feeders as a ration, as the average owner of horses or cows 

 found it difficult to realize that a ground hay was essentially different 

 from just merely hay. And few recognized the fact that alfalfa hay 

 was not "just hay," though no less an authority than Hoard's Dairyman, 

 in the issue of September 22, 1911, states that, because of its high pro- 

 tein content, ordinarily around 14 per cent, alfalfa hay of good quality 

 is worth $70 per ton if timothy is selling at $20 per ton. When too much 

 alfalfa, either in the hay or meal form, is fed, particularly to horses, it 

 overstimulates the animal's digestive organs and kidneys. For the 

 above and the further reason that sometimes the miller failed, through 

 inability or disinclination, to ship the quality of meal that he had sold, 

 perhaps a majority of the small feed consumers were not immediately im- 

 pressed with alfalfa meal. 



But in the meantime the manufacturers of concentrated feeds of 

 various kinds were quick to recognize in alfalfa meal a product for which 

 they had urgent need; a product that contained protein in its most de- 

 sirable form. Immediately they began incorporating it in their mixed 

 feeds with highly beneficial results. It practically revolutionized the 

 mixed-feed industry. Under the watchful eye of an expert chemist the 

 meal was added to ground corn, oats, barley, kafir, wheat screenings, 

 cottonseed meal, the by-products from oatmeal and other breakfast-food 

 plants, molasses, and even peat moss. It might be putting it none too 

 strongly to state that alfalfa meal has been largely responsible for the 

 exceptional development of the commercial mixed-feed industry during the 

 past few years, nor to maintain that the elimination of alfalfa meal to- 



