Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 July 1875 — Saving Straw For Fodder. [ARTICLE]

Saving Straw For Fodder.

If cereal grain be harvested at the proper period and the straw be cured as it should be, the crop will make a large quantity of excellent fodder. But in many instances straw is rendered unfit for fodder by being allowed to bleach in the rain, dews and sunshine. The fact that straw becomes brittle as it deadens shows that it has lost its albumen or gluten which gave it toughness, and, as the water or sap was given off simultaneously with its electricity, the albuminous compounds, the most soluble and volatile constituents of vegetation, doubtless escaped with the evaporated sap. We can easily make a comparison between the nutritive value of dead brown standing grass and well-made green hay, Mnd the measure of difference will afford a good criterion by which to estimate the amount of nutritive substances that escape into the fleeting air in the process of ripening our seed bearing for grain crops. And such substances are for the time lost or wafted away on the wind’s wings unless we provide some means of attracting and retaining them. Having no means of measuring the amount of nutritive matters thus escaping, we can assume them at one-third; calling the seed another, and the dead straw the remaining third. So then one-third of nutritive substances of our crops escapes into the air in the state of gas during the process of ripening in summer and fall; and so every season. Unless we can attract those gases back again and retain them for the* nourishment of them a third *f the food of next crop—and so of each succeeding one —must be supplied in the shape of manure or by further exhausture of the soil. Considering, then, how few manure more than once in seven years, and how many not once in twenty—is it any wonder that the best of soils are run out, impoverished, exhausted of their crop-feeding substances, as is now being done with the best lands throughout the Mississippi Valley? Especially is it any wonder that barrenness ensues when in the majority of cases manure is not supplied nor are the escaped gases attracted, fixed and combined for the succeeding crop’s substances.— N. Y. Herald.