374 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 



saddle. The country was extremely rough and the 

 going bad. A horse must have endurance, speed, 

 bottom. It is charged that alfalfa makes a horse 

 soft, lacking in endurance, sweating easily. There 

 is truth in the charge ; we will explain it later. The 

 fact is no horses 'could have worked better under 

 the saddle than did these alfalfa-fed range horses. 

 They had no other hay and for grain they had corn ; 

 we 'had nothing else for them. 



And yet it is true that the horses worked best 

 when they were worked regularly and worked hard. 

 If they were idle for a long time, meanwhile eating 

 much alfalfa hay, they did get soft and sweated 

 considerably when suddenly put to work. I do not 

 attempt to explain this fact. I think that the reason 

 is that the idle horses ate too much alfalfa hay, 

 took into their systems several times as much pro- 

 tein as their bodies needed or could use, and thus 

 induced some sort of unhealthful condition of the 

 body cells. It did not take them long to get hard 

 under work. But it is assuredly true that idle- 

 ness and excessive alfalfa feeding will make a horse 

 soft. Idleness and six eggs a day will make all sorts 

 of things wrong with a man, for that matter. 



That alfalfa will develop a hard horse is evidenced 

 by the fact that not a few splendid race horses have 

 been developed in California and elsewhere on a 

 diet almost altogether composed of alfalfa hay and 

 pasture. 



No Heaves nor Colic. At Woodland Farm for 



