CLOVER CULTURE. 15f 



must provide some method for utilizing- the great surplus oi 

 carbonaceous food products that exists on his farm. Western 

 states have a very great surplus of this carbonaceous food. 

 Corn, their great crop, is highly carbonaceous, and straw, 

 cornstalks and sorghum still more so, and the ordinary tame 

 grasses, outside of the clovers, scarcely less. No one of these,, 

 nor all of them together, can be fed exclusively to t young and 

 growing stock, or to milk cows, without great waste of the 

 food. The young grasses alone furnish a balanced ration,, 

 but only for a brief period 01 the year. 



The continuous waste that goes on for eight months in= 

 the year becomes so enormous that no section can compete 

 with other sections blessed with albuminoids with which to- 

 balance up rations. Oats is about the only stock grain that 

 in itself comes near being a balanced ration, and in default of 

 the legumes farmers are compelled to use oil meal, cotton-seed 

 meal and wheat bran in order to feed their carbonaceous 

 rations without waste. The clovers come in to meet the 

 requirements with nitrogenous compounds, drawn not from 

 the soil beneath, but from the air above, and not only store 

 nitrogen in the soil by means of their roots, but in the form 

 of hay and pasture supply this much-needed want. Eastern 

 farmers who travel through Western Kansas and Nebraska 

 and Dakota and other wheat-growing sections and see the 

 great mass of straw given to the flames each year are accus- 

 tomed to declaim against the thriftlessness of the Western 

 farmer. He is at least as wise as they, for experience has 

 taught him that cattle will eat themselves poor by trying to 

 live on this carbonaceous food, and that for him its main 

 value is in its ash, which he therefore distributes as wisely as- 

 possible by heading his wheat and burning his straw. If, 

 however, he can grow clover or alfalfa to balance up this 

 excessively carbonaceous food, the straw becomes at once a 

 mine of wealth. 



English wheat growers are this year, in many cases, get- 

 ting more for their straw per acre than for their wheat, for 

 the reason that they can use it economically and without com- 

 petition, whereas in the growth of grain they are compelled 

 to compete with the whole world. 



In the arid regions of the plains, the mountains or the 

 Pacific coast, the word alfalfa has a charm second only to 

 gold and silver, because it furnishes in the form of hay a 

 ration that improves or balances up every other forage with 

 which it is fed. As the subject of feeding rations becomes 

 better understood through the greater number of analyses oi 

 western grains and grasses and carefully conducted experi- 



