Food for „, - J ^ „ grows everywhere and needs no help from 



Plants The Nature or ° -r -n i -j • 



man ir nature will only provide moisture. 



on — Grass for Hay. ^^ . l- • t i 



"" 1 o a certain extent this is true. I he 



thousands ot fine roots of the grass plants, spreading in 

 every direction through the soil and reaching almost every 

 quarter-inch cube in the upper eight inches of the field on 

 which the grasses grow, can utilize more of the available 

 fertility than can the roots of plants grown in hills or drills, 

 which reach only with difficultv and late in the life of the 

 plant the more remote parts of the soil. Grasses, also, are 

 usually grown in a mixture of species, each of which feeds 

 upon a slightly different combination of elements, so that 

 single ingredients in the soil are not so rapidly exhausted. 

 The grass tops, moreover, shade the soil and check evapo- 

 ration, so that the moisture in the ground nearly all passes 

 through the plants themselves, bringing to them its own 

 freshness and the stores of dissolved food which it helps to 

 render available. Thus the grasses have been able, all 

 through the earlier and middle stages of our agriculture, to 

 utilize the rich supply of fertility locked up in virgin soils, 

 that they might delight the palates of feeding animals with 

 the crisp tenderness of their luxuriant growth, or send up 

 the thick stand of feathered shafts which later were cut 

 down to lie in glistening gray-green swaths, presently to 

 ride in heaped-up stateliness to their resting place in stack 

 or mow. 



^ p ^ Here seemed no need of artificial feeding ! 



Causes of Crop . , u ^u u ^ c •] a 



r^ ., jT , And even when the grass began to fail and 

 Failure Under .,, r i i f c u r 



^, . ,, , , yields of hay shrank rrom three or four 



Old Methods. ^ , ^ , ,^ l- j u 



tons to the acre to half or one-third the 



amount, growers have usually thought they could not 

 afford to feed directly. Pasture grass is not often con- 

 sidered a cash crop; and meadow hay does not, perhaps, 

 bring to the pocketbook, when sold, quite as large a revenue 

 as tilled crops. So farmers have preferred to manure the 

 cultivated crops and to trust that enough fragments would 

 be left over to satisfy the less insistent demands of the 

 grass. Of late, however, more careful study of the situation 

 has led progressive farmers to believe that the advantage 

 lies in a reversal of this process. To give the grass and 

 clover the best of care and to feed them liberally, allowing 

 the neglect in feeding, if there be any, to fall upon the 



