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Red Clover

Categories: THE CLOVERS

Wherever red clover thrives there is no more valuable

plant than this legume for making and keeping soils productive under

ordinary crop-rotations. The tyro in farming finds his neighbors

conservative in thought and method, and may rightly see room for

improvement. He naturally turns to new crops that are receiving much

exploitation, but should bear in mind that the world nowhere has found

a superior to red clover as a
combined fertilizing and forage crop for

use in short rotations. Farmers turn aside from it because it turns

aside from them. There has been increasing clover failure in our older

states for a long term of years. It has become the rule to seed to

timothy with the clover in the short crop-rotations as well as in the

longer ones, and chiefly for the reason that clover seeding has become

no longer dependable. In many regions the proportion of timothy seed

used per acre has been made large because the clover would not surely

grow. In the winter-wheat belt, where the custom has been to make such

seedings with wheat, timothy being sown in the fall and clover the next

spring, this increase in the timothy has made matters worse for the

clover, but it has helped to insure a sod and a hay crop. "Clover

sickness," supposedly resulting from close clover rotations, and the

prevalence of plantain and other weeds, have been assigned as a partial

cause of clover failure. It is only within recent years that the true

cause of much failure has been recognized.



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