222 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



I suppose that timothy is more largely cultivated than any of 

 the true grasses. There are many things that can be said in its 

 favor, and yet it has some weak points. The things that stand 

 specially in its favor are these : In the first place it is a grass that 

 when you want to sow it you can get -pure, clean seed. You 

 know exactly what you have and that is a great deal to begin 

 with. Timothy seed is also cheap. There are very few of the 

 grasses that give this clean seed. The seed is usually surrounded 

 by closely adherent chaff, and this chaff cannot be easily sep- 

 arated from it, so you don't know whether your seeds are good 

 or not. The chaff makes it very bulky and you get compara- 

 tively few seeds in a given bulk and then you can't tell whether 

 your seeds are of good or bad quality. That is one reason why 

 there are so many failures in sowing grass seeds. There is 

 another advantage in timothy. It is one of those grasses that 

 does not deteriorate very rapidly after it has ripened, and you 

 can leave it for a considerable length of time after it has blos- 

 somed and the seed is matured, and it will be comparatively 

 good. iVnother advantage is that it has comparatively few 

 leaves. That is not an advantage as a forage plant, but it is an 

 advantage for transportation. It does not waste so much by 

 handling as many other varieties of hay. 



Now, these are some of the principal advantages. Of course, 

 you all know what the disadvantages of timothy are. In the 

 first place we find in comparison with other grasses, speaking 

 simply for our own state, that we never have secured as great a 

 weight as we have in other grasses. That is, weighing the 

 whole product that comes from a given area of ground. In the 

 second place, the quality is not as good for many kinds of stock. 

 If you want to feed a team that you are driving constantly upon 

 the road and that you simply wish to keep in good muscular 

 condition, or are feeding stock where you don't look for an 

 increase of weight, or flow of milk or anything of that kind, the 

 timothy may be one of the very best kind you can use, but cer- 

 tainly it is not one that ranks high in what we call nutritive 



