The flowering head of Medicago sativa
Alfalfa, or lucerne, lined the roadsides in many places during my recent trip across Canada’s Prairies. In a few places, it was also cultivated as a crop for hay.
Medicago sativa is suspected to be native to south-central Asia. With a long history of cultivation spanning millennia, its precise origin is uncertain. The primary purpose for cultivation, both now and when it was first domesticated, is for livestock. It has many advantages, including: highest yields per hectare, high nutritional quality, drought-resistance, nitrogen fixation, a long life-time (usually between 4 and 20 years), and a tolerance to being cut back multiple times in a year. Partly because of these properties, it was the most cultivated forage legume in the world (at least in the early 2000s).
More on production and use of alfalfa, via Wikipedia:
Alfalfa is widely grown throughout the world as forage for cattle, and is most often harvested as hay, but can also be made into silage, grazed, or fed as greenchop. Alfalfa usually has the highest feeding value of all common hay crops. It is used less frequently as pasture…Its primary use is as feed for high-producing dairy cows, because of its high protein content and highly digestible fiber, and secondarily for beef cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. Alfalfa hay is a widely used protein and fiber source for meat rabbits. In poultry diets, dehydrated alfalfa and alfalfa leaf concentrates are used for pigmenting eggs and meat, because of their high content in carotenoids, which are efficient for colouring egg yolk and body lipids. Humans also eat alfalfa sprouts in salads and sandwiches…Fresh alfalfa can cause bloating in livestock, so care must be taken with livestock grazing on alfalfa because of this hazard.
Pollinator.ca has a excellent write-up on the pollinators of Medicago sativa; in short, alfalfa leafcutter bees and wild bees are excellent, but honeybees are only adequate (apparently they do not like getting hit in the head by the floral parts when tripping the pollination mechanism).
You might be interested in this story on the alkali bee pollinators for alfalfa: https://www.nwpb.org/2018/06/29/native-bees-and-alfalfa-seed-farmers-a-northwest-love-story/
Alfalfa is also drought tolerant. 😊
Though I’ve never seen seedpods on lucerne (alfalfa to the rest of the world) in Australia, despite the lack of highly efficient pollinators, it is one of the most widely distributed exotics in this country. It also exhibits a great deal of variability. One relatively prostrate type has been promoted widely as “Cancreep” and it has the capacity to root at nodes, forming a mat.
I grew up on a dairy, and early on I fell in love with the scent of alfalfa. My summer is not complete unless I stop by a field and pluck off a few flower heads to smell.
Aha. So when I see Lucerne dairy products now I know that the brand name refers to alfalfa and not Switzerland.
Lovely picture, as always — thank you Daniel. We seldom stop to look at these small, delicate flowers, to admire their many hues. Here, in the southern part of Montreal island, when lawn is allowed to grow into a wildflower meadow, alfalfa is one of the many naturalized forbs that delight they eye — and now we’re told, the nose.
Oh, I can’t take credit for today’s image. It’s Anne’s.
An irresponsible monster upstream has diverted an entire perennial stream to water his alfalfa. Wildlife are suffering – a bull moose in velvet drained my bird bath dry yesterday, very abnormal; and trees along the creek are dead (alders) or turning yellow and dropping their leaves (poplars/cottonwoods). The monster can drain this creek, which has hosted cutthroat trout in previous years, because our wretched water company has contracted with him to allow it – a ghastly example of twisted water use in the west, horrid water rights law, and ignorant cruel behavior. Additionally, our neighborhood and all customers of the same water company are restricted from any landscape watering – shortages that have arisen only after their cooperation with developers to build hundreds of bloated houses here in the dry foothills of the Wasatch mountains. Alfalfa to feed cattle in the west is pointless and utterly wasteful. There is also the possibility that the stream killer will profit from selling his ill-gotten crop to China to feed their lust for meat. I am no admirer of alfalfa culture.
Water Wars: Who Controls the Flow? via NPR, for those interested in reading about the conflicts that are occurring.
It has it’s place in the right circumstances, but as a desert irrigated crop it’s a negative. Particularly just to be shipped off to China. this is happening in California’s Imperial Valley while San Diego runs out of water.