54 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 



in lime and thus unfitted for alfalfa. Yet the soils 

 as our fathers found them were sweeter than they 

 are today, and thus we often hear old men relate 

 that in their boyhood their fathers grew lucerne and 

 that their daily task was to cut it and feed it to the 

 cows ; this on land that will not today unaided grow 

 alfalfa at all. 



In reading over the written accounts of how to 

 grow lucerne published in the last century one is 

 amazed to find how much the authors knew of the 

 habits of the plants, and as much astonished to per- 

 ceive that few if any of them understood the vital 

 connection between alfalfa and a large percentage 

 of carbonate of lime in the soil. One of the good old 

 books on agriculture is "The Dictionary of the 

 Farm," by the Eev. W. L. Rham, Vicar of Wink- 

 field, Berkshire, who died in 1843. The article on 

 lucerne is strikingly good, so good, indeed, that had 

 the author known two facts of which he seems to 

 have been unaware there would have been left little 

 to add. He evidently had not traced the relationship 

 between thrifty lucerne and a strong lime content in 

 the soil, nor had he seen the harm that comes to 

 lucerne when it is mown off too early, before it has 

 made sufficient growth to start the little shoots at 

 the base of the stems. Ignorance of the latter fact 

 is very universal in England at the present time and 

 leads to much lack of thrift and falling away of the 

 alfalfa plants that are usually cut with the scythe 

 bit by bit, and fed to horses green, just as Rham 

 advised. The writer has indeed pointed out to Eng- 



