140 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



are off it makes a wonderful growth on the rich soil, and has with it a great 

 mixture of the crab grass that will not down, and the two together are more 

 easily cured than the peas alone. If there is a man anywhere who can afford 

 to sell hay, it is the Southern farmer with cow pea hay; for, in selling it, 

 he leaves behind in the soil an accumulation of nitrogen for the succeeding 

 crop, and where it commands the price it did last summer in South Carolina, 

 of $18 per ton, it may pay better to sell than to feed, provided the money 

 from the sale of the pea vine hay is returned to the soil in the form of com- 

 mercial fertilizers, to enable it to grow a. larger crop of hay. And the ad- 

 vantage in the growing of cow pea hay for sale is that only the mineral forms 

 of fertilizers are needed for it, and, not like grass, demanding large supplies 

 of nitrogen. Hence it is possible in the South, in particular localities where 

 hay commands these high prices, for a farmer to profitably grow a hay crop 

 while improving his land in doing it, and thus get fertilizers for all his crops 

 without cost. I say this is possible in some localities, but as a rule the South 

 needs live stock worse than anything else, and only a few farmers will be 

 situated near a market that will take their hay. Eight here there could be a 

 good profit made in this way, since, in the city of Raleigh, the people who 

 keep cows are reduced to the necessity of buying either Northern timothy hay 

 at $20 per ton, or to feed on cotton seed hulls at $5 per ton, and these are 

 perhaps a- little better than the pine shavings, but not much ; and for the 

 milch cows the timothy hay is but little better and much more costly. It 

 would be an easy matter here to grow two tons per acre of cow pea hay, and 

 then an easy matter to sell it at at least $15 per ton, and if the $30 per acre 

 were invested in good fertilizers for the farm, the sale crops could be greatly 

 increased, by the fact that only the cheaper forms need be bought, as the sale 

 crop of hay would leave the nitrogen as a profit. Where a man, then, is 

 growing cotton near such a market for hay, and will not keep the stock he 

 should, this opens a way for the improvement of his soil in an effective and 

 economical way. The danger in all this selling of hay, however, lies in the 

 temptation to keep, for other purposes, the money received and to let the land 

 suffer. But a ton of cow pea hay would remove from the land only about 

 two dollars' worth of phosphoric acid and potash, and a sale of thirty dollars' 

 worth of hay, if invested in fertilizers, would return to the farm far more 

 than was taken from it, to take no account of what remains in the roots left 

 in the soil. While the selling of hay as a general practice is not the best 

 thing most farmers can do, it is, nevertheless, true that farming is business 

 and not a sentiment; and the farmer should grow and sell that which pays 

 him best, taking the future of the soil into consideration. 



