500 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 



deficient in humus and nitrogen. I hoped that al- 

 falfa might grow upon it. As an indication, our 

 manager, G. P. Blair, had established a few acres 

 on a rich old horse pasture. This looked fairly good. 

 Personally I felt that with so much lime in the soil, 

 and also phosphorus and potash, it ought not to be 

 very difficult of restoration. 



We began the work by opening the old drainage 

 canals. We were 80 feet above the Gulf of Mexico 

 and hundreds of miles distant. This shows how flat 

 our land was. It was fascinating work opening the 

 old canals, some of them antedating the war and ap- 

 parently not cleaned since then. With the water off 

 the land, we started the plows. The soil was very 

 clammy and dead. It is a soil type difficult to man- 

 age. It is usually plowed with water in the fur- 

 rows, and in fact is hard to plow at any other time. 

 We planted corn the first year, with soy beans and 

 cowpeas also. The thin furrow slices turned up 

 wet bake into brick, but the first shower loosens 

 them and crumbles them into ' i buckshot, ' ' hence the 

 name of buckshot soil. Our corn, even with nitrate 

 of soda fed to it, was far from good. Perhaps it 

 made 20 bushels to the acre. We needed drain tiles 

 and in fact we laid a few strings of them, with good 

 results, but there was neither time nor money for 

 much underdrainage. The Scots had not much faith 

 and no desire to put much money into the demon- 

 stration farm. 



Despairing of tiles I turned to surface drainage. 

 If we could throw up the land in beds 2 rods wide 



