alfalfa

"The second Sharkey, the alfalfa sportin' writers are callin' him.

He would never know how sure a breeder was his new bull--the son of that fine creature he had imported; two cows he had spotted as not paying their board could go on for months eating good alfalfa and bran before a new herdsman might become convinced of their unreadiness to turn the expensive feed into white gold; he had not written down the dates when the sows were to farrow, and they might have litters somewhere around the strawstack and crush half the little pigs.

Above the straight line of the uppermost irrigating ditch, all is brown as on a high road; while all below is of as bright a green as verdigris, from the beds of alfalfa, a kind of clover.

Forage yields and fall stand scores of two [N.sub.2]--fixing alfalfas, UMN 3097 and Agate, differed in response to increasing rates of manure applications between locations (Fig.

"But falcata has a more fibrous root system that's unlike other alfalfas and more like grass," says Schuman.

Persistence and yield among nondormant alfalfas selected for grazing tolerance.

New alfalfas will likely trace their heritage to the third generation of a new bioenergy alfalfa being bred by the team.

April shoot heights of the dormant cultivars 53Q60 and 54H69 were low because of slow initiation of shoot growth in spring typical of dormant alfalfas. Averaged across cutting treatments, the semidormant germplasms 96P51PSI and Z57NO2 were tallest in April.

"What we've discovered," says Bauchan, "is that some yellow-flowered (Falcata) alfalfas, which carry genes for winter hardiness, stand persistence, and resistance to bacterial wilt, have a lower amount of heterochromatin than some of the standard, purple-flowered alfalfas." This suggests that breeders could use certain Falcata types to shuttle, or transfer, desirable new traits from wild alfalfas into cultivated varieties that normally wouldn't accept such exchanges directly.

The major constraint preventing widespread use of nondormant alfalfas in temperate regions is their poor winter hardiness.

Alfalfa called The Queen of the Forages" is one of the most widely grown crops in the US and is also one of the most important forage crops in the world.