Clover farming

Front matter

. CoEyrightW.

COPHUCHT DEPOSK

—

Chapter I. An Object Lesson In The Pasture

fF AN observant farmer will take a walk any time during the growing season in the pasture, and note with even a little care the various grasses growing so luxuriantly about him, he can scarcely fail to observe the wide difference between the clovers and the other, or true, grasses. Whatever differences there may be in size, form and structure, he will notice that all other grasses have long, comparatively slender and coarse leaves, clasped firmly around the stalk by a sheath; that they have at intervals solid nodes or joints; and that by means o\ these they are able, even with a hollow stalk and very little solid substance, to withstand a severe windstorm.

He will notice at the same time that

CLOVER FARMING.

the leaves of the clover are entirely afferent; that they are very thin — as thin as fine paper — and arranged, not singly or alternately on the opposite sides of the stalk, but in triplets at the end of a small stem; and that the plants have no nodes or joints, hence are inclined to lie down about the time .they attain full growth, and some of them before. Comparing the grasses with wheat, oats, barley or rye, he will note that these have the same form and structure as blue grass, timothy, red top and orchard grass, and hence are really grasses, the function of which ; s to grow seeds instead of forage. A little reflection will show him that corn of all varieties, all kinds of canes and sorghums, are really giant grasses, and all built on the same general plan as the grasses in the pasture.

If he will examine the root development of any of the clovers, he will discover that it differs as widely from that of the other grasses as does the loaf structure and stalk formation. In the true grasses

AN OBJECT LESSON IN THE PASTURE. ?

he will find a great mass of fibrous xoots penetrating, in dry times, to great depths — in the case of blue grass and corn, to a depth of four feet or more — while the clovers send their main roots down straight as far as may be necessary, and the character of the subsoil permits, to reach permanent moisture. They are thus the subsoilers of the pasture field and bring up from the lower depths soil fertility that has been washed down by the rains, and in their decay leave it where it can be reached readily by the roots of other grasses, thus gradually and almost imperceptibly deepening as well as enriching the soil of the farm.

If he will now pull up a plant of any of the varieties of clover and examine the roots closely, he will find on each a number of nodules or protuberances, called tubercles from their similiarity to certain formations in the lungs of consumptive patients. A close examination will show that these are not parasites, or an evidence of disease, nor yet root seeds, as some

8 CLOVKK FARMING.

suppose, but plants separate from the clover, and a fine example of what scientists call "symbiosis," or associated life. Similar tubercles may be found, on examination, on the roots of peas, beans, wisteria, milkweed, locust trees, and some thousands of other trees, shrubs and weeds which belong to the order known to botanists as the "leguminosae," and which always and everywhere increase the fertility of the soil on which they grow. These tubercles are essential to the thrift, if not indeed the life, of all plants, shrubs and trees of this order, and, as we will explain hereafter, are the means by which they alone of all orders and classes of vegetable life' are enabled to avail themselves of the nitrogen of the atmosphere. This, as we shall see hereafter, is a matter of the very first importance in agriculture. Suffice it to say now, that this explains (what has been a matter of common observation among farmers for two thousand years) why all crops do well after clover. While all plants that have green coloring matter in

AN OBJECT LESSON IN THE PASTURE. 9

their leaves obtain their carbon from the atmosphere, the order known as the leguminosae, or legumes, alone, so far as our present, knowledge extends, is the only one that is able to obtain its nitrogen from the same source. While plants of this order obtain their carbon through their leaves, they secure their nitrogen, or that portion of their substance which, when fed to animals, contributes to the formation of flesh, muscle, red meat, from the atmospheric air which circulates around their roots.

Returning from the walk in the pasture and garden, the thoughtful farmer may remember that his father, dead perhaps long years since, often remarked: "We may reasonably expect a good crop of corn this year, because it is planted on clover sod;" or % "We are sure of a good crop of wheat next year because we are drilling it in this fall on clover fallow;" or, "The blue grass will make fat cattle this year because it has plenty of white clover in it." He may have heard his mother, of sainted memory, remark: "When there is good clover hay going into the barn, the cows will give plenty of milk next winter;" or, his father say: "The steers are making great gains because they have clover ha)- with their corn;" or, "We shall have strong lambs and plenty of them with this bright clover hay for winter feed." He may have heard his grandfather say (with all the pride which old men manifest when talking of their achievements when young men) as he smoked his pipe on a summer evening on the front porch: "This farm was badly run down when I bought it, but I made a good farm out of it with clover. Stick to clover, John, and you will never be a poor man."

If the farmer is a man of some reading as well as observation and experience, he may remember that the improvement in live stock in England took place shortly after English farmers began generally to grow clover, and that they began, in fact, to grow clover before any of the cultivat-

AN OBJECT LESSON IN THE PASTURE. 11

ed, true grasses; and further, that live stock improvement has kept right on advancing with the western advance of the clover area. If his boy has been to the academy or high school, and has secured an English translation of Virgil, which he has been using on the sly as a "pony" to help him over the hard places, he may be able to point out such passages as the following, scattered through the writings of that wise old book farmer, who wrote some two thousand years ago:

"At least, where vetches, pulse and tares have stood And sta ks of lupines grew, (a stubborn wood) The ensuing season in return may bear

The bearded product of the golden year. For flax and oats will burn the tender field, And sleepiug poppies harmful harvest yield."

We find Virgil giving directions as to sowing the legumes in the following:

"Sow beans and cl ..ver on the rotten soil,

******

Vile vetches would you sow and lentils lean, The growth of Egypt, or the kidney bean, Begin when the slow wagon r descends, Nor cease your sowiug till n idsummer ends."

[bid

The old poet had some notions about

12 CLOVEIi FAKM1NG.

clover as food for dairy cows, for he sings:

"If milk be thy design, Bring clover grass,"

If, turning these facts over in his mind, the reader will note carefully the farmers in his neighborhood who grow large crops and to whom farming (and money-making as well) seems to come easy, he will find that they are clover growers, some of them, in fact, known in the neighborhood as "clover cranks," and that clover with them is the beginning and the ending, the Alpha and Omega of their favorite rotation, and also that for some reason their stock of ail kinds seems to thrive in a way that is a continual surprise to men who do not grow clover.

\s it not, therefore, worth while to study A plant, or family of plants, that has behind it such a wonderful history; to know not only what it did for farmers twenty centuries ago in ancient Rome, what it has been doing every where since, whereever it has been properly cultivated, but how it does it and how it can be used to

AN OBJECT LESSON IX THE PASTURE. 13

the best advantage to grow larger crops on the farm, finer stock in the yards and pastures, and thus fill the home — the best thing about the farm — with peace and comfort?

Chapter II. The Farmer And The Clovers

♦ffT IS no longer a question what the farmer will do with the clovers, but what he will do without them. The vital problem at present is, what will he do to be saved from soil exhaustion — inevitable where the crop is sold in the market off the farm — from soil washing, from drouth as the result of the exhaustion of vegetable mold, or humus, in the soil — inevitable on any farm where grain cultivation is continuous — and from the severe competition of other farmers who know how to use clover. Fertility is the stored energy of the farm, without which the farm is only a place in which fertility may be stored at large expense in the future. The present value of the farm is measured by its available fertility; its future value by its possible fertility. The rest is rock, clay, sand and gravel, of little or no value i for agricultural purposes; practically a place on which crops may stand while they use what fertility may be present.

Fertility once lost may be restored by periodical inundation, as in the Nile valley; by the application in large quantities of barnyard manures, as on farms near towns and cities; by the purchase of grain, meals and forage for feeding purposes, as on stock farms in the British Islands; by the purchase of commercial fertilizers, as in the eastern states and in Europe; or by growing the clovers. The last method, in connection with the manure made on his own farm, is the only method at all available for the farmers of the western and middle states, and is a much better method for the farmer in the eastern states than the unintelligent purchase of commercial fertilizers.

There was a time when the farmer could safely ignore the clovers. When the farmers of the eastern and middle states were clearing out the forests and scratching with rude implements into a soil enric'ied by the leaf mold of ages and the as'ies from log heaps and brush piles — soil, sure to produce thirty, sixty or a hundred fold — while he was waiting for the roots and stumps to rot, he did not then need to concern himself with the clover question. When the western farmer was breaking out his eighty, or his quarter, and meanwhile grazing his cattle on free grass, grown on land owned by the government or the speculator, who paid heavy taxes to build schoolhouses, bridges and public buildings; when the soil was full of grass roots and his unfenced fields waved, under an}- sort of cultivation, with golden harvests; when the cow could hide herself in the tall blue stem of the uplands and the hat of the rider alone was visible as he galloped through the tall grass on the bottoms; when weeds vexed not the soul of the settler, there was no need for him to trouble himself about the clover question.

These were the days of the pioneer, when all farmers were equal because equally poor in purse and rich in good feeling and brotherly kindness; all alike soil robbers, scattering with a lavish hand the fertility which nature had been carefully storing for them since the first of all farmers was turned out of Eden, probably because he did not have enough to do to keep him out of mischief.

One generation of soil robbers has generally been enough to waste this heritage to the extent that farming on their methods failed to be profitable. Then came drouths, with no less average rainfall than in the years of abundant crops; for the humus, or vegetable mold, had been destroyed by constant cultivation without manure and without the rotation of grass. Grasshoppers, chinch bugs, blight, plagues without end, then attacked the scanty crops. The mortgage followed, and the soil robber, having reached the end of his tether, and brought up with a short turn, the meaning of which he did not full)- understand, was forced to do some thinking and determine whether he and his would persevere in soil robbing or become farmers indeed, and consider, as all good farmers in clover growing countries do, not what they will do with clover, but how they are to get along without it.

When a magnet is moved slowly through a mixture of iron filings and dirt, it acts as a touchstone, attracting the iron to itself and allowing the dirt to remain. A good strong current of wind will blow out the dirt and leave the iron remaining. The knowledge of clover culture is the touchstone of the farmer when his furrows begin to complain of waning fertility, and separates the men who have the capacity to become true farmers from those who are merely soil robbers, which last are, sooner or later, driven westward by the tempest of financial adversity. The man who will seriously consider the clovers and consider his way to the right use of them, will soon learn the truth (which the soil robber never seems able to learn)

that no land, naturally good to begin with, can ever be wholly impoverished by one generation, or any number of generations, of soil robbers.- The good Lord, who has ever a watchful eye for the generations of the unborn, will not allow any race of soil robbers to impoverish the land to a degree that will render it impossible for a good farmer to restore its fertility. He has stored the average soil of farm lands, in every place where He intended men to live by farming, with inexhaustible amounts of every element of plant life except three or four compounds — potash, phosphoric acid, nitrogen, and in some places lime. The first two He has locked up in combinations which gives them out in available forms very slowly — grudgingly, so to speak— so that but a small amount comparatively, is ever available at any one time for plant growth, and cannot, therefore, be wasted. Nitrogen, without which the ash elements mentioned above cannot be used at all, is, in the form in which the plant uses it, easily washed out of the soil through drainage, natural or artificial, or down into the subsoil, but He has spread over the earth an atmosphere weighing fourteen pounds to the square inch, about four-fifths of which is nitrogen. Not an ounce of this, however, is available except by means of the microbes, or germs, which have their home, or workshop, in the little tubercles on the roots of the clovers and other legumes, whether they be so-called grasses, weeds or trees. It is by these He feeds all plants, and through them all animals, with one of the elements without which life in plant, tree, beast or man is impossible on this planet.

The true farmer who has studied the clovers knows this, and hence does not hesitate to buy a wornout farm at its market value, assuming the mortgage which the soil robber has placed upon it, knowing that a well clovered and well managed farm will in due time lift the mortgage and make the farm a delightful home. This is the history east, west, north and south, at home and abroad, in this land and in all lands.

The true farmer understands that there must be thorough tillage and a seed bed as perfect as possible in order that every atom of available, fertility may be within reach of the root hairs of the plants and not locked up in clods — in order, also, that the moisture may be available that the clovers may have a chance to germinate, throw out their rootlets, enter into associated life as partners with the plants which we call tubercles, and thus draw on the winds of heaven, or more exactly, the portion of the atmosphere that is driven into the soil, for the most valuable and costly element of fertility, and thus thrive and prosper independent of the nitrogen of the soil.

The humus, or vegetable mold, may be worn out by long cultivation on the part of the soil robber, but the true farmer knows that when he comes to plow under the clover roots, with what manure he can command, he can restore it, and his land will no longer pack after heavy rains, or his crops fail in time of drouth when "the heavens are as brass and the earth as iron." The true farmer knows that if his land be thin and not subsoiled, he can, by a rotation based on clover, gradually subsoil it by the use of clover, the roots of which go down da>' and night, Sabbath and Saturday, year in and year out, and by their decay admit air into the passages stored with marrow and fatness for all plant life. He knows, moreover, that even if the ash elements, compounds of potash and phosphoric acid, be in small supply, the roots of the clovers can get them when other plants fail; that they have a way of compelling the rocky particles of the soil to give up their stores; and knows that he has fn the clover pastures and clover hay a stock feed that will put plenty of bone in his young and growing stock, that will cover the bones with muscles, and, with cheap corn, interlard them with fat. Hence, the man who understands clover is not afraid of ever wasting fertility, or of undertaking the task of restoring it when wasted, by sowing it on land naturally good to begin with.

The soil robber, or the farmer who will not consider the clovers and will not work with them, sells out in due time, or is perhaps sold out, and moves West, seeking other virgin soils, only to find, sooner or later, that there is no further agricultural West, and from a land owner becomes a tenant, from a tenant becomes a laborer, and finally drifts into the city to become a hewer of wood or a drawer of water.

Consider the clovers. The time is fast coming, and in many places has already come, when the clover question determines whether a man is capable of becoming a true farmer with a happy home and family, independent as only the farmer can be, or a soil robber, with calamity sooner or later in store for him and his. Study the clovers.

CHAPTER HI.

THE CLOVER FAMILY.

^^^HERE are families — and families, t L whether among men, animals or plants. There are families among men, a few — a very few — the name of which is, in itself, a sufficient and favorable introduction of a member to the wellinformed stranger; families that have had sufficient sense and family pride to prevent marriages with other families having a low code of morals, and have thus kept themselves clean and pure, living up to their highest ideals. There are other families so uniformly low in their tastes and instincts, so corrupt in their lives and morals, living according to such a low standard, that they would degrade a name, however honorable it may have been once, and make it in time a byword and reproach. In most families there is an intermingling of the good and bad — cross currents of vice and virtue — Baldwins and crabs growing 'on the same family tree; and hence it has long since become a proverb: "There is a black sheep in every flock." "Who does he take it after?" (pardon the bad grammar; we must quote proverbs correctly) is the question that is asked at once by every close observer when a good family produces a scapegrace, or a low family a noble character.

We may observe the same law at work in our families of Hve stock, even in those "bred to the purple" — the outcrop of original sin in the shape of a badly formed or colored animal, the result of some unfortunate cross, perhaps many generations since.

We find the same law at work among families of plants. (I am quite well aware, O critical botanist, that the word "family" is not used in the same sense in botany that it bears in stock breeding, but rather in the sense of "species;" but you see I

2G CI.OVKK FARMING.

am writing for plain, common people who have never studied botany, and must use words in a popular, rather than a scientific sense.)

There are some families of plants, a few — a very few — that have no positively bad members, although all of them seem to have some far out relations that are of but little account; and were the better members human beings, they would, perhaps, not care to know them, or acknowledge the rest. There are again other families that are so generally bad that we are greatly surprised if there are any members that prove themselves to be even respectable".

For instance, there is the nightshade family, giving us the deadly poison known as nightshade; the henbane, or hyosciamus — an equally deadly poison, although at times a valuable medicine; the foulsmelling jimson, or Jamestown; tobacco, despised by all who do not use it, and many who do. The family becomes a trifle respectable in the red pepper, beloved of the Greaser; still more so in the ground cherry; useful in the tomato and potato (sweet potatoes do not belong to this family); really beautiful in the petunia, and lovely in the white flowered nicotina.

It is far otherwise with the clover famiily. There is no really vicious member in the whole family. There are some members of which it may be said, there is not much good about them, as, for example, some of the wild clovers, the buffalo clover, or the sweet clover, which, however, is only a poor relation and not strictly a member of the family. Even in this we m . . be doing them wrong, and may in the future discover virtues now unsuspected. The members of the clover family have no vices, though some of them have faults. (Gentle reader, who of us have not?)

Our present talk is about the members of the clover family proper. First, as a matter of course, we take up the best known member — the common red. It is not so imposing in appearance as the

28 CLOVEB FA K MING.

mammoth, docs no*!: spread itself around in such a lordly fashion, nor attempt to smother out the other grasses that seek their share of moisture and sunlight in the same field. It is willing to associate with timothy, with mammoth clover, or orchard grass on terms of equality — a sort of democratic plant, willing to be accommodating, to give and take, neighborly in its tastes, habits and instincts. Like a good many of the best men I have ever known, it is not quite selfish enough for its own good, and allows blue grass and white clover, those monopolists of the pasture, (corporation monopolists at that, because perennial — with perpetual succession — while red clover is a biennial and expires by limitation) to plant themselves near it and finally surround it and strangle it to death, or at least smother out its posterity. When the farmer wishes, while resting his land from grain crops, to fill it up with the sort of fertility — nitrogenous — foi which all other grains and grasses are hungry, to grow first-class feed for anything that eats grass or hay, the common red clover is to be preferred above all other members of this royal family. There is no plant that grows out of the ground that will do more, and in so many different ways, for the quarter-section farmer. While furnishing, as do the rest of the family, fertility to the tired land, and of that precise kind which is most valuable in itself — the highest in price if purchased in the shape of commercial fertilizers — the most easily exhausted by leaching — it yields abundance of the kind of pasture and hay that is needed above all others to balance every other sort of grain, grass or forage grown on the farm. While all other crops uniformly do well after clover, all kinds of stock (with the exception, perhaps, of driving horses, and this for obvious reasons) do well on clover hay, and for the same reason. To the soil the clover roots supply the sort of fertility all other plants require and demand a.z a condition of profitable growth. To the animal the clovers furnish the albuminoids,

30 GLOVBK FAKMINU.

in which nearly all other grains and grasses are deficient, and thus balances the ration.

The common red is really the only clover that is well adapted to the meadow — on good corn land. On this kind of land, if reasonably rich, the mammoth grows too coarse and the alsike furnishes too little forage. The white clover is not a meadow grass under any circumstances. It is a weed when in the meadow and should, therefore, be treated as any other weed. (Remember that a weed is simply a plant out of place, and the character of the plant cuts no figure, whatever.) Therefore, to the eighty-acre, the quarter-section, or even the half-section farmer, who is a stock grower as well, we say: "Consider the common red clover. It is the best of all the clovers for your ordinary purposes."

The common red, however, does not suit the purposes of all farmers, and there are times, conditions and circumstances where the mammoth should be preferred on every farm. For instance, there are many farmers who have been soil robbers in the past, and, having repented, are now trying to reform and mend their ways. These men realize that they must have clover to restore fertility to their land, but do not see how they are to get along without a cash crop while this restoration is going on. They have no stock to speak of, no cattle barns or hay sheds, few fences and no money available for the purchase of stock (beyond their work horses and a few pigs) or to make improvements necessary for profitable stock growing. Therefore, they do not need either the pasture or the hay that is furnished by a crop of common red clover or c'over and timothy. What they need is a crop from the clover field that does not need live stock to convert it into cash. This type of farmer should pin his faith, for the time being, to mammoth clover. If he secures a good stand, one that will smother out the weeds, he can reasonably expect a three-bushel seed crop, worth from #10 to $20 per acre, or about as much as any other crop, the cash expense of which, that is, the amount that he would be required to pay for outside labor if he does his own cutting and exchanges help in hulling time, will be about $3 per acre. By adopting a three-year course he can get over his entire farm with clover once in three years and increase his corn crop from fifteen to twenty- five bushels per acre each year, and his other crops, with the possible exception of oats, in the same proportion.

It is quite possible with mammoth clover to secure a month or six weeks pasture and a superior seed crop by pasturing closely up to June 1st, and in some seasons up to the 1 5th, and then allowing the seed crop to start. Farmers who have roughish lands at a distance from buildings and do not need the hay, can use the mammoth to advantage on such lands.

There are also times when, on account of the ravages of the clover seed midge, it becomes impossible to grow the common red for seed, and the mammoth then becomes indispensable when a seed crop is desired. We will deal with this midge, in common with other insect enemies of the clover plant hereafter. It is enough at present to say that the common clover seed midge is two-brooded and that the broods are timed to correspond with the two flowering periods of the common red. The spring crop of females is ready to lay eggs when the clover heads first appear and before the bloom is on, and the second crop from the eggs of the first are ready to propagate the vile species when the second crop begins to head out. The mammoth, being from two to three weeks later, comes in between the two blooming periods and hence escapes the ravages of this enemy of the clover plant. While, therefore, for the average farmer the common red is the favorite member of the clover family, the mammoth has claims that entitle it to great respect, and, at times and under certain circumstances, to special consideration.

The modest member of the family is the little white clover, or, as it is sometimes called, the white Dutch. Like other modest folks, it is often underestimated and frequently misunderstood. It is of all others the clover for the permanent pasture — the intimate friend, the sworn companion and faithful ally of the blue grass. It accepts a hard lot on clay lands, worn out by the soil robber, that have been turned out to native grass, tenderly binding up this broken-hearted land, but fairly revels in luxuriance on rich bottoms. White clover and blue grass seem to us to have been married with a tie so binding that no district judge can grant a permanent divorce. .