TIMOTHY a7 
The hay is easily cured, bears handling well, and may 
be cut any time between blossoming and the ripen- 
ing of the seed with comparatively little difference in 
the quality of the hay—at least, for horse feed. For 
these reasons, farmers prefer timothy to other grasses. 
On the other hand, timothy hay is exceedingly pala- 
table, particularly to horses, and it is the demand for 
horse feed in the cities that fixes the price of hay in 
this country. 
Again, horses that are kept for hire are frequently 
driven to the limit of endurance after a full feed. 
Such horses must have feed that will digest readily 
and not produce derangement of the digestive organs 
under these circumstances. For this purpose timothy 
hay has no equal. It is also probably true that too 
much stress has been placed by recent writers on the 
need of protein (nitrogenous material) in feeding- 
stuffs. A few years ago it was frequently the custom 
to value feeding-stuffs by the amount of protein they 
contained. Timothy, being low in nitrogenous con- 
stituents, was said to have little nutrition in it. It 
should be remembered, however, that an idle animal 
needs very little protein, while an animal at work 
usually gets the bulk of its protein from grain. Ex- 
perience has abundantly shown that timothy hay alone 
is an excellent ration for an idle horse, or even a horse 
with-moderate exercise. These facts seem to justify 
the important place that this grass occupies in Ameri- 
can agriculture. There are circumstances under which 
other grasses deserve much more attention than they 
thus far have received in this country, as indicated 
elsewhere in these pages. 
