192 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



here it does not anywhere near compare in growth and weight of crop with 

 Indian corn or saccharine sorghum on the same land. It is probable that 

 it is better adapted to the fertile soils and droughty climate of Kansas than 

 to the east. Here we can grow far more and better feed from Indian corn 

 on the same land. 



SORGHUM. 



Considerable attention has been given of late to the saccharine varieties 

 of sorghum as forage plants. Treated solely as a forage plant and sown 

 thickly, broadcast, there is no doubt that sorghum will make a very passable 

 hay, but a hay very hard to cure. Some farmers of our acquaintance tried 

 sowing sorghum along with their cow peas, with the notion that it would 

 make the peas easier to cure. It had the opposite effect, for peas are easily 

 cured without sorghum but very hard to cure with it. Sorghum is mainly 

 valuable as a soiling crop, to tide cattle over a summer drought. As a forage 

 crop it is of the same class and less valuable than Indian corn, the king of 

 American fodder plants. While sorghum and Kaffir corn will stand drought 

 very well, they both succeed best and make their best crops on low, moist land, 

 with plenty of fertility. Both are exhaustive crops and neither of them yield 

 a hay that can compare in value with that from the legumes, which are bene- 

 ficial to the soil. In the present state of our agriculture, especially in the 

 older States, we cannot see the advisability of growing these non-leguminous 

 forage plants when we can do so much better with the legumes, both in the 

 quality of the forage and the value of the plants to the soil. In certain sec- 

 tions of the South, like some parts of Texas, where the soil has exuberant 

 fertility and the climate is droughty, the Kaffir corn and sorghum may have 

 a special value ; but in our thin uplands in other parts of the country, we con- 

 sider it unwise for the farmer to waste fertility in growing forage inferior to 

 that which he can produce while helping in the improvement of his soil. The 

 same may be said of the grasses in a large part of the South. There are rich, 

 low lands where grasses can be profitably grown, but though we may seem 

 heterodox, we are fully convinced that the South, so far as the uplands are 

 concerned, does not need the grasses as she does legumes; and until these 

 uplands are built up in fertility it is a mistake to waste time in the effort to 

 grow the grasses for meadow purposes. With a standing pasture of Bermuda 

 and a good rotation with the legumes on our uplands, we can develop the pro- 

 ductive capacity of our soils faster and maintain their fertility better without 

 grass than with it. 



