446 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
profitable corn production to the edge of the sage 
brush, and even beyond this a little way, can with 
right management produce alfalfa seed. And this 
alfalfa seed growing may pay as well as good grain 
crops will pay in more rainy lands. J] am fortunate 
in having at command a careful study of this whole 
subject by two master minds, Charles J. Brand and 
J. M. Westgate, of the Bureau of Plant Industry, 
Department of Agriculture, which is submitted: 
The growing of alfalfa in cultivated rows for seed is of more 
recent origin in this country than is the production of hay by 
this method. John Spurrier, in a book entitled “The Practical 
Farmer,” published at Wilmington, Del., in 1793, appears to be 
the first American writer to mention the growing of alfalfa in 
cultivated rows. The cultivation was designed to retard the de- 
velopment of weeds, which often prove very destructive to the 
broadcasted seedings of alfalfa in the Middle and South Atlantic 
States. This method is still practiced to a slight extent in a 
few places in the South, where, however, the climate is too 
humid for the successful production of alfalfa seed. 
In England as early as 1730, Jethro Tull, the inventor of the 
drill and the originator of tillage of farm crops in the modern 
sense, advocated and practiced the growing of alfalfa (lucern) in 
rows. His teachings first appeared in his “Specimens.” Later, 
in 1829, these were republished by Cobbett in a work entitled 
“Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry.” 
What was apparently the first attempt to grow alfalfa for 
seed in cultivated rows in this country was made by what was 
then known as the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction of the 
United States Department of Agriculture. Several contract fields 
of Turkestan alfalfa were seeded in wide rows in different parts 
of the Great Plains area in 1903. The poor seeding habits of 
Turkestan alfalfa when grown in this country, together with the 
fact that the plants were grown much too thickly in the rows, 
greatly handicapped the logical development of this method. 
The application of the row method of cultivation has been 
suggested by a number of American experimenters, including 
Prof. W. J. Spillman, Prof. W. M. Hays, Prof. W. A. Wheeler, 
Mr. W. M. Jardine and Mr. C. S. Scofield. Of these only Prof. 
