Vol. LX XIV, No. 4818. 
NEW YORK, AUGUST 7, 1915. 
WEEKLY $1.00 PER YEAR. 
A 1 alk About Alfalfa Breeding. 
Let the Farmers Do It. 
Taut I. 
S CIENTIFIC WORKERS.—From time to time 
during the past few years some earnest and en¬ 
thusiastic reporter has written, either for the farm 
papers or for the great magazines and newspapers, 
rather glowing accounts of some new Alfalfa. lie 
has usually wound up his article by saying that 
this new Alfalfa was still in the hands of some pro¬ 
fessor who was developing it and crossing it with 
some other rare varieties, the ultimate effect of 
which could hardly help being so great as to revolu¬ 
tionize the entire Alfalfa producing business. As a 
rule after reading one 
glowing account of this 
new variety and the re¬ 
sults which were sure 
to be achieved by it and 
its hybrids, we have 
grown weary of watch¬ 
ing for another article 
which would tell what 
further had been accom¬ 
plished along this line. 
I do not wish to be mis¬ 
understood as criticis¬ 
ing anybody at all in 
this line. Newspaper 
reporters are mighty 
valuable members of so¬ 
ciety and it would be a 
flat old world without 
them. That they write 
sometimes in glowing 
colors is not necessarily 
a fault, but what I wish 
to comment on in this 
article is, first, the ab- 
' surdity of placing this 
so-called hybridiza¬ 
tion entirely in the 
bands of college profes¬ 
sors. leaving farmers 
entirely out of consider¬ 
ation in the matter, and 
' then I wish to give the 
farmers a little idea of 
what common sense 
alone, not college edu¬ 
cation. might he able to 
accomplish along the 
line of breeding Alfalfa. 
NATURAL CROSS¬ 
FERTILIZATION.—I n 
the first place, all of 
you know that there are 
two classes of plants, 
one of which nature has 
decreed should cross-fertilirx*; that is, that an in¬ 
dividual plant will not naturally fertilize itself, but 
is fertilized by a neighboring plant. Sometimes the 
pollen is carried by the wind; more frequently it is 
carried by insects. The other class of plants natur¬ 
ally self-fertilized, and it requires a skillful plant 
breeder to produce hybrids amongst them. In the 
first class belong Alfalfa, all of the clovers, Timothy, 
corn, and a world of others. In the second class be¬ 
long wheat, oats, Soy beans, and many others. 
Plants which naturally cross-fertilize are so con¬ 
structed that the chances for their fertilizing them¬ 
selves are meager. Cross-fertilization is almost ab¬ 
solutely the rule with them, and where the pollen 
is carried by insects, they frequently cross even 
when separated by considerable distances. I have 
known of cases where there seemed to be no ques¬ 
tion that the pollen had been carried four or five 
miles. 
INSECT AID.—Now to apply these principles to 
the plant under discussion. There would be very 
little difficulty in crossing Alfalfa in any way that 
you wish to, because, as stated, it is an open or 
cross-fertilized variety. Two plants of any two 
varieties or of the same variety growing side by 
side would be pretty sure to be visited by the same 
insects and their pollen freely carried from one to 
the other. More than that they would probably be 
visited by insects from the neighboring fields and 
even in many cases by insects from a mile or more 
away, and in this way fertilization would take 
Rooting System of Alfalfas: Left, plant of ordinary Alfalfa, 8 years; right, plant of “Cossack.” Observe branched root. 
place. Now to apply a little common sense to this 
matter. Instead of a professor working to make 
special hybrids, uniting two rare and unusual spe¬ 
cies, hoping to combine the good qualities of each, 
what would happen in nature is that the plants 
which you were trying to breed might be fertilized 
by 50 different plants, their pollen coming anywhere 
from a radius of a few feet to a few miles. Sup¬ 
posing, however, that someone should have two rare 
and unusual varieties which he wished to cross. 
There would be no particular difficulty about cross¬ 
ing them. What he would probably do would be to 
plant them side by side, screen them in order to pre¬ 
vent contamination from outside sources, and either 
by introducing the proper insect or by doing hand 
work to make the first cross. This seed he would 
be compelled to save, plant in a plot containing no 
other Alfalfa, again screening this entire plot and 
fertilizing as before. 
COST OF EXPERIMENT.—I can conceive of 
some wealthy man continuing this process until he 
had a hundred acres all screened over to prevent 
contamination from the outside. On a hundred 
acres in the best producing sections he might har¬ 
vest 500 bushels of seed, but I cannot conceive of 
any man, however wealthy or liberal, who would be 
willing to carry the matter any farther than this. 
By the time he had his first carload of 500 bushels, 
he would have spent a good deal of money. Ilis 
seed would have to sell for quite a high price in or¬ 
der to reimburse him. The result then would be 
that you and I would 
buy in the first place 
seed enough for one 
acre, say 20 pounds. 
We might pay a dollar 
a pound or we might 
pay even more than that 
to get this first lot. We 
would plant this acre 
across the road from 20 
acres of common Alfal¬ 
fa, or perhaps we might 
have more than that 
amount of common. 
Neighbors a quarter of 
a mile away would have 
a like amount of com¬ 
mon Alfalfa. Within a 
radius of a mile there 
might be 200 or 300 
acres of Alfalfa all of 
the common variety. 
MIXING THE PRO¬ 
DUCT.—Having p a i d 
our dollar a pound or 
more for this stock 
seed, we would quite nat¬ 
urally wish to save seed 
from it ourselves to sell 
again while the price 
remained high. Now we 
would not go to the ex¬ 
pense of screening our 
acre; probably it would 
never even occur to us. 
The result would un¬ 
questionably be that it 
would hybridize w i t h 
most all of the Alfalfa 
that was within, say a 
mile of our purebred 
plot. The plants result¬ 
ing from the seed which 
we sold would then be 
hybrids between o u r 
pure variety and the common Alfalfa. The people 
to whom we sold would go through perhaps the 
same process that we had. Almost certainly none 
of them would screen an entire meadow and their 
seed would again be hybridized with the common 
Alfalfa around them. I can hardly conceive of an 
entire community of farmers uniting and sowing, 
in many cases, 50 or a 100 acres down to the new 
sort at high prices in the first place. The probabili¬ 
ties are that it would be isolated farmers here and 
there putting in an acre instead of a whole com¬ 
munity putting in their entire acreage to a new va¬ 
riety which they had never tested out before. It 
seems to me that the hybridization with the common 
Alfalfa would proceed very rapidly and I think that 
all of you agree with me. It seems to me that if 
