Alfalfa

Alfalfa (Medicago

sativa), also known as Lucerne, Purple Medick and Trefoil, is a perennial flowering plant cultivated as an important forage crop.

Alfalfa lives from five to twelve years, depending on variety and climate. It is a cool season perennial legume, growing to a height of 1 meter. It resembles clover with clusters of small purple flowers. It also has a deep root system sometimes stretching to 4.5 metres. This makes it very resilient, especially to droughts. It has a tetraploid genome.

Alfalfa is native to Iran, where it was probably domesticated during the Bronze Age to feed horses being brought from Central Asia. It came to Greece around 490 B.C. being used as a horse feed for Persian army. It was introduced from Chile to the United States around 1860. It is widely grown throughout the world as forage for cattle, and is most often harvested as hay. Alfalfa has the highest feeding value of all common hay crops, being used less frequently as pasture or haylage. Like other legumes, its root nodules contain bacteria, like Rhizobium, with the ability to fix nitrogen, producing a high-protein feed regardless of available nitrogen in the soil.

Its wide cultivation beginning in the seventeenth century was an important advance in European agriculture. Its symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and use as animal feed greatly improved agricultural efficiency. When grown on soils where it is well-adapted, alfalfa is the highest yielding forage plant.

Alfalfa is one of the few plants that exhibit autotoxicity. Alfalfa seed will not grow in existing stands of alfalfa because of this. Therefore, alfalfa fields must be plowed down or rotated before reseeding.

Alfalfa sprouts are used as a salad ingredient in the United States and Australia. Tender shoots are eaten in some places as a leaf vegetable. Human consumption of older plant parts is limited primarily by very high fiber content. Alfalfa has the potential to be the most prolific of all leaf vegetable crops, processed by drying and grinding into powder, or by pulping to extract leaf concentrate .

Alfalfa is believed to be a galactagogue.

In the United States, the leading Alfalfa growing states are Wisconsin and California, with most of the latter state's production occurring in the Mojave Desert by means of irrigation provided by the California Aqueduct.

Harvesting

When alfalfa is to be used as hay, it is usually cut and baled. Loose haystacks

are still used in some areas, but bales are much easier to transport. Ideally, the hay is cut just as the field is beginning to flower. When using farm equipment rather than hand-harvesting, the process begins with a swather, which cuts the alfalfa and arranges it in windrows. After it has dried, a tractor pulling a baler collects the hay into bales. There are three types of bales commonly used for alfalfa. Small "square" bales--actually rectilinear, and typically about 40 x 45 x 100 cm (15 in x 18 in x 38 in)--are used for small animals and individual horses. The small square bales weigh between 25-30 kg (50-70 pounds) depending on moisture, and can easily be hand separated into "flakes".

Cattle ranches use large round bales, typically 1.4 to 1.8 m (4.5 to 6 feet) in diameter and weighing up to 500-1,000 kg. These bales can be placed in stable stacks, placed in large feeders for herds of horses, and unrolled on the ground for large herds of cattle. The bales can be loaded and stacked using a spike on a tractor that pierces the center of the bale, or with a grapple (claw) on the tractor's front-end loader.

A more recent innovation is large "square" bales, roughly the same proportions as the small squares, but much larger. The bale size was set so that stacks would fit perfectly on a large flatbed truck.

Other useful herb information: Mentha | Butterbur | Cascara Sagrada | Apricot | Coltsfoot | Saw Palmetto | Passiflora

Alfalfa

Page Content: alfalfa , alfalfa hay , alfalfa seed , alfalfa hay for sale , benefit of alfalfa , alfalfa sprouts , alfalfa cube , alfalfa pellets .