MEADOWS AND PASTURES 



47 



for a considerable portion of the season of possible pas- 

 ture. Whether the trouble lies with the farmer or with 

 the mixtures it is not possible to say. Both are prob- 

 ably to blame — the farmer for not giving the mixtures 

 a more extended trial, and the mixtures for not giving 

 better results when they are tried. Usually, when the 

 American farmer wakes up to the fact that he is not 

 getting sufficient income from his pastures, he aban- 

 dons the use of pastures as much as possible instead of 

 trying to make them productive enough to pay. There 

 is room for a lot of demonstration work on this subject 

 at the experiment stations. The methods used in 

 Europe ought to be given a thorough trial here. Until 

 this is done a good many people will always believe 

 that the productiveness of English grass-lands could be 

 duplicated here. There are some parts of the country 

 in which blue-grass and Bermuda grass are quite satis- 

 factory as pasture. There are man}' places where they 

 are not. The use of brome-grass and alfalfa as a pas- 

 ture mixture is mentioned elsewhere in these pages. 

 This mixture deserves a fair trial over all parts of the 

 timothy region where blue-grass is not highly pro- 

 ductive. Mixtures of timothy, redtop, orchard-grass, 

 tall fescue (the kind grown in Eastern Kansas), blue- 

 grass, Canada blue-grass, and the clovers, including 

 alfalfa, deserve to be tried extensively all over the 

 northern half of the country for permanent pasture. 

 Until this is more generally done it is impossible to 

 state what the result would be. The writer believes a 

 mixture of all the above varieties named would furnish 

 more pasture in many parts of the country than the 

 common mixtures do. 



