CLOVER CULTURE. 151 



fertility were to be had for a song-. Payments for the land r 

 for the improvements and for living- expenses had to be made 

 from crops of ready sale at cash prices in the world's markets. 

 These bulky products had to be hauled from five hundred to 

 seven hundred miles to the nearest water line and from a 

 thousand to fifteen hundred miles to the seaboard, and that, 

 too, as soon as gathered. Paradoxical as it may seem, the 

 pioneer farmer as a rule has not been able to build granaries 

 to store the products of his land. The result has been two- 

 fold exclusive grain farming- in necessary violation of the 

 well established principles of successful agriculture the world 

 over, and the g-lutting- of the markets of the world with cereals- 

 to an extent that has produced acute and severe distress 

 among- grain farmers everywhere. A cry of distress, both in 

 years of shortage and abundance, has been heard in every 

 part of the United States in which the improved grasses have 

 not been contiguous to the grain and cotton field. Mean- 

 while the American farmer, by reason of his fertile soil, im- 

 proved machinery and skilled agricultural labor, is crowding 

 the British, the Russian and the Hindoo farmer to the wall, 

 and while suffering himself, is inflicting more severe suffering 

 on farmers in other parts of the world under less favorable 

 conditions. 



We have outlined these existing conditions, not to make 

 the broad claim that clover culture is the panacea for all the 

 ills to which agricultural flesh is heir, but to show that the 

 evils of a false system can be remedied only by a return to a 

 correct one, and this cannot be done successfully without the 

 introduction of the legumes, and especially of the clovers. 

 What the American farmer needs at present is something 

 that will enable him to maintain cheaply the fertility of his 

 soil, especially in nitrogen, the most costly and at the same 

 time the least stable, of all the elements of fertility in all 

 soils. The potash and phosphoric acid will remain locked up 

 in various soil compounds until it is needed by the plant, but 

 the nitrogenous compounds, as soon as converted into nitrates, 

 the form in which they are assimilated by plants, are liable 

 to be washed out by rains. He needs a system of farming 

 which will enable him to condense his freights by feeding his 

 products on the farm, and shipping them in the form of live 

 stock, butter, cheese and wool, and he needs besides a home- 

 grown forage^ rich in nitrogen or albuminoids that' will 

 enable him to use to the best advantage the carbonaceous 

 food products which exist in such super-abundance in the 

 West. In, this lies the ' * way out " for the western farmer. 

 We do not by any means affirm that he is not suffering from 



