CHAPTER X 
LEGUMINOUS FORAGE CROPS 
Every farmer is now familiar with the group 
of leguminous crops. This group deserves even 
more attention than it is now receiving, because of 
the relations of the plants to nitrogen. The plants 
belonging to the legume family include the various 
clovers, peas and beans. All these plants have a 
souree of supply of plant-food that is not acces- 
sible to most other plants, particularly not to the 
cereal plants. It is well known that after a crop 
of clover the land, as a rule, produces a better 
growth of corn, or other cereals, than when such a 
crop follows a grain or a grass crop. It was thought 
for a long time that this improvement in land was 
due to the greater proportion of root substance in 
the surface soil, because the plants root deep and 
gather food from the lower layers, storing it in 
the thickened roots. The soil improvement was 
not attributed to their power of gathering nitrogen 
from the air until careful experiments showed that 
the soil nitrogen was not consumed but rather in- 
creased by their growth. The fact that clover 
gives better returns as a stock feed than an equiva- 
lent weight of timothy was also known for a long 
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