130 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



I once addressed a Farmers' Institute in North Carolina, and was trying 

 to show the farmers the advantage of growing the cow pea. I soon found 

 that my audience hardly agreed with me. But when I showed them the 

 danger of plowing under the peas green, I saw that I was getting more atten- 

 tion. When I closed, a farmer rose in the audience and said: "We thought 

 that you were going to advise the plowing under of the peas. Some years 

 ago Prof. came down here and urged us to grow peas as a green manure 

 crop. Some of us tried it and soured our land so that for a year or two it 

 would hardly produce anything, and since that we have been afraid of peas." 

 From that day's talk, however, the farmers of that section realized the true 

 value of the cow pea, and now they are grown on every vacant spot during 

 the summer. One of the leading farmers in the upper Piedmont section of 

 North Carolina, in a good wheat growing section, assured me that he had had 

 disastrous results from the plowing under of a heavy growth of rag weed on 

 a wheat stubble, in preparing the land for wheat again. The instances are 

 so numerous in the South of the evil results of plowing under green vegeta- 

 tion in hot weather, there cannot be any doubt of the danger of such a 

 practice. 



But even where the plowing under may not result as badly as it does in 

 the South, the plowing under of a great mass of vegetation is a bad prepara- 

 tion for the wheat crop, as it prevents the proper firming of the soil so essen- 

 tial to the success of the crop. But the main reason why green manuring, as it 

 is called, is a bad practice, is that it is wasteful, and not in accordance with 

 true business principles. The great reason for the growing of a crop oi 

 clover or peas is the acquisition of the nitrogen of the air and the storing 

 of it in the soil. Now if the clover or peas are plowed under at midsummer, 

 they have not done anywhere near what they would do for us in the way of 

 getting nitrogen, for this is mainly done during the later period of growth 

 approaching the maturity of the plant. If the crop is allowed to fully 

 mature, there will be about as much left in the roots as the whole crop con- 

 tained at an earlier period of its growth. Then, too, the feeding value of 

 the pea crop is fully $20 per acre, and it must be an extra valuable crop that 

 will warrant the use of food of that value as a manure direct, especially when 

 by feeding it and carefully saving the manure, we can recover a large part of 

 the manurial value in the droppings of the animals. Hence, we insist that 

 green manuring, either North or South, does not mean the burying of the 

 legumes as a whole; but the fertilization of the crop as food for cattle and 

 the careful saving of the manure. Grow legumes as a matter of course, and 

 allow them to do all the nitrogen gathering they are capable of doing, but do 

 not cut short the work they are doing because of the theories of men who have 



