“Alfalfa is the oldest plant known to man; it is the most valuable forage plant ever discovered. It has not been appreciated in the eastern part of the United States until the last five years. We are now growing it successfully in every state in the Union, and I believe it is safe to say in every agricultural county in the United States it is being grown with success. Two weeks ago I secured a picture of a field of alfalfa in South Carolina that was sowed over sixty-nine years ago. It was still in pretty good condition. I know of another field in New York State sowed forty-five years ago, and one in Minnesota that was sowed thirty-three years ago. All over the West there are thousands of fields of alfalfa that were sowed twenty-five years ago that are still yielding large crops. In Wisconsin alfalfa yields three crops of hay a year, and in Texas, four and five large crops. In southern California, below sea-level, where they never have any frost, they cut alfalfa eleven times a year, and in Texas, south of the Rio Grande, they cut it nine times a year. “Alfalfa does not exhaust the soil. Nitrogen is the soil’s most important element, and the one most liable to give out; the one the farmer is called upon to supply first. Alfalfa does not ask the farmer for nitrogen at all, because it can get its nitrogen out of the atmosphere. Four-fifths of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen. Ordinarily, plants cannot make use of that nitrogen at all; the roots of the alfalfa will leave in the soil eight or ten times as much nitrogen as was there before. The farmer who plants alfalfa, clover or peas does not have to get nitrogen from the fertilizer factories. I know one farmer who for the past eight years has made an average of eight and one-half tons per acre of alfalfa on irrigated land in the state of Washington. I have heard of other men that produced twelve tons an acre in southern Texas on irrigated land. It would hardly be possible to produce that much on land that is not irrigated, because rain does not come to order. “I have lived ten years in a country where the horses, cattle, sheep, hogs and chickens eat alfalfa hay, or green alfalfa, the year round. It is the richest hay food known. Eleven pounds of it is worth as much for feeding purposes as ten pounds of bran.” A most pleasing word-picture of alfalfa is that by Geo. L. Clothier, M. S., who has studied his subject closely in the field, the feed lot and the laboratory, and he paints it thus: “The cultivation and feeding of alfalfa mark the highest development of our modern agriculture. Alfalfa is one of nature’s choicest gifts to man. It is the preserver and the conserver of the homestead. It is peculiarly adapted to a country with a republican government, for it smiles alike on the rich and the poor. It does not fail from old age. It loves the sunshine, converting the sunbeams into gold coin in the pockets of the thrifty husbandman. It is the greatest mortgage lifter yet discovered.