The Book of Alfalfa: History, Cultivation and Merits: Its Uses as a Forage and FertilizerCoburn, F. D. (Foster Dwight)
History
The Book of Alfalfa: History, Cultivation and Merits: Its Uses as a Forage and Fertilizer
Coburn, F. D. (Foster Dwight)
Alfalfa
Bearing also upon the adulterations, impurities and defectives found in
alfalfa seed sold in the markets, extracts from reports of tests made at
the Wooster, Ohio station (Bul. No. 142) are exceedingly interesting. In
fifteen samples bought, each of one dollar’s worth, the quantity of pure
germinable seed was found to range from 5.1 to 9.3 pounds; the number of
noxious seeds found in a dollar’s worth of that bought as alfalfa seed
ranged from 360 to 185,940. Seven of the fifteen one-dollar samples each
carried more than 23,000 noxious seeds.
Seed bought at $7.80 per bushel showed as low as 61.2 per cent that was
germinable, of which the _actual_ cost was $12.74 per bushel. None of
the fifteen samples had less than 77 per cent of germinable seed. One
pound sample contained 21,728 noxious seeds, of which 18,144 were
lamb’s-quarter or pigweeds; the same pound also had 3126 seeds of
dodder. Another pound carried 6420 seeds of crab grass, and one had 3325
seeds of foxtail.
The station authorities recommend that no alfalfa seed be sown until
carefully screened through a screen fine enough to remove dodder seeds.
Wire sieves or screens with twenty meshes to the inch are found to serve
the purpose.
ADULTERANTS DESCRIBED AND ILLUSTRATED
As a further and more thorough discussion of the frequent adulterants,
Prof. H. F. Roberts, botanist of the Kansas experiment station, has
kindly prepared, with illustrations, for this volume the quoted
statements which follow here:
“The immense and steadily increasing value of alfalfa as a forage crop
in the United States, and the high price of the seed, make the securing
of sound, pure seed a matter of supreme importance to farmers, and
render it equally important for them to be able to recognize, by sight,
the presence in alfalfa seed of the adulterants and seeds of certain
weeds most commonly known to occur. There is conclusive evidence that an
amount of adulteration and substitution is actually practiced with
alfalfa seed. It is usually charged that this is done abroad,
especially, as is alleged, in Germany.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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