SWEET CLOVEK: UTILIZATION, 



25 



the proper stage for curing into hay. Table IV also shows that the 

 digestible nutrients of sweet clover when fed to sheep compare fa- 

 vorably with alfalfa. It was stated that the sweet-clover hay used 

 for this experiment was stemmy and that it had not been cut until 

 it had become woody. The pea hay had passed the best stage. for 

 cutting when it was harvested, while the alfalfa hay was in excellent 

 condition. 



In a feeding experiment with sheep conducted by two students at 

 the Iowa State College it was found that the protein digested in 

 sweet-clover feed alone was 69 per cent and that the addition of corn 

 to the hay ration increased the digestibility of sweet clover to 82 

 per cent. Alfalfa and red clover showed similar increases of the 

 digestibility of the protein content when corn was added to the ration. 

 The percentage of digestibility figured for the protein in the corn 

 was the average of a number of digestion experiments. The prob- 

 ability is that the digestibility of the corn was also increased by the 

 presence of the hay in the ration, so that not all the increase in the 

 digestibility should be credited to the hay constituents of the different 

 rations. 



FEEDING EXPERIMENTS WITH SWEET CLOVER. 



Few agricultural experiment stations have carried on definite feed- 

 ing experiments to determine the value of sweet clover as compared 

 with other feeds. 



The South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station reported an 

 experiment in which lambs were fed on sweet-clover hay in compari- 

 son with alfalfa, pea- vine, and prairie hay. In this experiment the 

 lambs made a better gain at a less cost when fed sweet-clover hay 

 than when fed pea-vine hay. but not as large a gain as when fed 

 alfalfa hay. The results of this experiment are shown in Table V. 



TABLE V. Feedhic/ experiment icith lambs in South Dakota, showing the com- 

 parative ralue of different kinds of Ixni a.s- rouyhaae. 



[Grain ration consists of oats and corn in all cases: roughage varies.] 



The Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station also performed an 

 interesting experiment with lambs. A number of pens of 10 to 40 

 lambs each were fed different mixtures of feeds for 14 weeks. Those 



