(Ed. Note—Mr. Joseph E. Wing is regarded as the best authority in the United States on Alfalfa. He was born in 1861, took a common school education and worked with his father on a stock farm. Went to the Rocky Mountains when twenty-five years old, and became a cowboy, learning the business thoroughly and becoming manager of a large ranch. While in the West he saw the wonderful value of the alfalfa plant growing there, and determining to grow it in Ohio he came back to that State, bought the old home and went to work. He enriched and drained the old farm, laying fourteen miles of tile underdrain in a 320-acre farm. Last season he grew on that farm 400 tons of alfalfa hay. His two brothers, Charles and Willis, are partners with him on the farm, and they made last year, besides the alfalfa and other products, 50,000 pounds of lamb wool.—Ed. Trotwood’s.) Alfalfa will grow as well in the South, under right conditions, as it will in any country in the world without irrigation. Alfalfa sown in the South under wrong conditions will prove a discouraging failure. So, therefore, it is far from any desire of mine to encourage unwise experimentation or lead men to make unavailing efforts to grow alfalfa upon unfit soils or with wrong methods. Let us consider the few essential things that alfalfa demands. First, a soil that is not sour. Next, a soil that is well enough drained so that water does not saturate it at any time of the year, unless for a day or two following very heavy rainfalls. Then a soil that is rich in the mineral elements that go to make plants grow, phosphorus and potash, and well supplied, too, with nitrogen. And, to crown all, a soil supplied with abundant vegetable matter or “humus.” Given these things, and the South’s sun and skies, alfalfa will grow in most any part of the South and will yield annually four or five cuttings a year of the richest forage either to feed green, or to cure into hay. An acre of proper soil devoted to alfalfa will produce double the total amount of available food for animals that an acre of corn will, and of a higher class of nutrients. That is because the alfalfa is so rich in protein, the muscle and blood-building elements that are so much needed in a ration for all young animals, for dairy cows or any animals giving milk to their young. To prepare an acre of land for alfalfa may in some instances involve considerable labor and expense. If the work is rightly done it will be lavishly repaid by the grateful alfalfa plants, and after they have grown upon the soil for a series of years they will leave it richer than they found it.