FERTILIZERS WHERE HAY is THE MONEY CROP 139 



can make of his manure accumulation will be on the sod that is to go into corn 

 the following year, after mowing the spring crop. This will give a good 

 second crop and will prepare the sod better for the corn. Getting a good 

 price for hay, it will pay him to be liberal with the top dressings of com- 

 mercial fertilizers, and, for a rank growth of grass, nitrogen in the imme- 

 diately available form of nitrate of soda will usually be found the cheapest 

 and best. Farming for hay does not differ from farming for grain in the 

 need of keeping up the productivity of the land through fertilizers and a 

 good rotation, and under the conditions we have named, hay farming may 

 be the most profitable method of farming that one can adopt; while under 

 the conditions prevailing in most parts of the country, and on cheap lands, 

 the rule to feed all coarse forage on the farm is a good one. We have simply 

 endeavored to show that one may be so situated that hay will be the best 

 money crop he can grow. 



Then, too, there are places where the straw on the farm commands a 

 better price at the paper mills than hay sells for in most places. The straw 

 has little manurial or feeding value, being mainly useful as an absorbent 

 of the manure. Then, where a man can sell wheat straw for $6 per ton, as 

 is done in some places, he can do better to sell it than to feed it, provided he 

 returns the value in plant food to the soil. In that case the soil will be 

 the gainer, as the wheat straw has no such fertilizing value. 



One of the greatest advantages the market gardeners on the South 

 Atlantic coast have is the ease with which they can grow a large crop of hay 

 the same season in which they cultivate the land in vegetables. Crab grass, 

 which is classed as a pest in the North and elsewhere, develops here a value 

 that is unsuspected elsewhere. On the moist and fertile lands where the 

 early truck is produced for the Northern markets, if the land is simply 

 put in good order after the early truck crops are removed, there comes in a 

 wonderful volunteer crop of crab grass, which attains a height and luxuri- 

 ance unknown elsewhere and often cuts two tons per acre of excellent hay. 

 It is curious to notice, too, that not only the size of the crop is increased on 

 these fertile lands, but the quality of the feed is also improved. Crab grass 

 hay from a poor piece of land is hardly worth the saving. A friend in South 

 Carolina once told me that he cut some crab grass from a thin piece of land, 

 thinking that it should be saved, and a little later he cut a heavy crop from 

 a truck patch and put it into the same barn. His horse thrived well on this, 

 but later on he suddenly found his horse was falling off, though fed as usual, 

 and he found that they had gotten down on the poor land hay and that it 

 would hardly support life. But the true hay crop for the market gardens, 

 as it is elsewhere in the South, is the cow pea. Sown after the truck crops 



