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.