152 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
tion to such crops, and the machines employed for ordinary hay-making 
are not specially adapted for use in curing the vines; but it may, 
nevertheless, well be possible that, when used to supplement fodder- 
corn, the profit from pea hay would much more than compensate for 
the trouble of getting it. Perhaps the European system of presery- 
ing green forage by fermentation, that is to say the making of “ sour 
hay,” may sometimes be found useful in this particular case. For 
example, if sour hay were to be made from the forage, it might per- 
haps be found advantageous to grow fodder-corn and running beans 
(some free-growing tropical variety) together as a mixed crop which 
would be preserved in one common pit. 
In previous papers, I have repeatedly alluded to the kinds of 
foods at the disposal of our farmers which are highly nitrogenized and 
fit to be used in the compounding of well-proportioned rations. 
Cotton-seed meal and other oil-cakes, brewers’ grains, malt sprouts, 
peas, beans, * and all kinds of leguminous seeds, fish, and flesh, are all 
highly nitrogenous. So, too, are Hungarian grass, when mown young, 
clover, mown young and cured without too much handling, and a 
great variety of other leguminous plants, such as peas and vetches. 
Even young fodder-corn is a nitrogenous food as has just been stated. 
In general, it may be said that nitrogenous food could be collected in 
abundance by mowing very young grass or grain, or almost any other 
young plant. The reason why this mode of procuring forage is not 
practised more frequently is, simply, that the total yield of hay from 
the young plants would be very small as compared with the amount 
procurable from more mature plants. In a word, the large quantity of 
hay obtainable from the older plants is, generally speaking, worth more 
than the small quantity obtainable from the young plants, in spite of 
the superior quality of the latter. The labor of harvesting the young 
plants, moreover, might in some cases be very nearly as great as that 
of getting the mature crop. 
In former years, the nitrogenous food offered by young green plants 
was not infrequently put to immediate use by pasturing sheep upon the 
grain fields in spring and permitting the animals to eat down the first 
growth of leaves, or by mowing the grain fields at this season. Indeed, 
it was at one time proposed in Germany f to systematize the matter 
* In some parts of Great Britain, cow-feeders are said to be specially partial 
to bean meal. 
+ By Professor Hadelich, of Erfurt, Beckmann’s “ Beytriige zur G2konomie,” 
&¢e., 1782, 6. 447. 
