176 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



fully the protein needed in a ration for fattening beeves can be supplied by 

 the cow pea for little more than half the cost of cotton seed meal, and better 

 beef produced. From the products of his farm, then, and from crops that 

 improve his land, the Southern farmer can make money in feeding beef 

 cattle easier than the farmer of the North and West, and there will be no 

 permanent improvement in the Southern farming until there is more of this 

 stock feeding and less of spending money for nitrogenous fertilizers we do 

 not need to buy if we farm aright. If one half of the millions of dollars the 

 cotton States of the Atlantic seaboard spend every year for fertilizers con- 

 taining nitrogen for the cotton crop, was spent on phosphoric acid and 

 potash, and applied to the pea crop preceding the cotton crop, there would 

 soon be a vast improvement in the cotton crop, half the money would be saved, 

 and in a short time more than half could be saved by the feeding of the 

 abundant forage produced. One intelligent observer has said that the dif- 

 ference between the Carolinas and Texas was in the stock feeding. Texas, 

 with her empire of fresh soil, grows more cotton than any other State, and 

 yet Texas raises three beeves for every bale of cotton she grows; while the 

 Carolinas raise one animal for every three bales of cotton produced. Until, 

 by the proper use of the great forage plant with which the South is blessed, 

 the proportion is put in the same shape it is in Texas, there will be no per- 

 manent improvement in the soils of the Carolinas. 



VETCHES. 



Vicia sativa and some others of the same genus have become very gen- 

 erally naturalized in the South, and grow freely every winter in all vacant 

 spots, and at times among grass and other herbage. These are rather light 

 croppers, however. More recently attention has been directed to another of 

 the species of this genus, vicia villosa, the hairy or sand vetch. This plant 

 has been found to succeed under very diverse conditions, from the far North 

 to Gulf States. Its rapid growth and its hardiness in a great range of cli- 

 matic conditions renders that at present the most promising winter growing 

 legume we have, and it will probably take the place we had hoped the crimson 

 clover would take all over the country. While the value of the hairy vetch is 

 not as yet fully decided, it is certainly the most promising plant for its place 

 we have yet tried, and we trust that future trials will confirm this good opin- 

 ion. If allowed to ripen seed, this plant will seed the land and reproduce 

 the crop the following fall. But being a winter growing plant, it can never 

 become a troublesome weed. 



