TIMOTHY 



77 



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. 



