47<i 



Bureau of Farmers' Institutes. 



The Rothamsted Experiments. 



At the Rothamsted Experiment Station, England, winch I think 

 is the foremost in the world for thoroughness, reliability, and com- 

 prehensiveness of work with farm crops, a series of experiments 

 was begun in 1848, and has been carried on continuously since 

 that time, to discover the results from growing crops on the same 

 land continuously without and with manure, and from growing 

 similar crops in rotation without and with manure. The rotation 

 was the four-course one of turnips, barley, clover (or beans), or 

 fallow, and wheat. Without going into the details of the experi- 

 ments and the records as published, I desire to present the follow- 

 ing table which I have arranged from the reports of eight courses, 

 32 years (1852-1883). The results from the continuously-grown 

 crops relate to the produce of the same eight seasons as those in 

 which the rotation crops were obtained. The unmanured and 

 superphosphate conditions were the same in both cases. In the 

 case of the mixed manure results, it is to be observed that in the 

 rotation experiments, a quantity of manure was applied for the 

 turnip crops only, which was to carry the whole of the crops of 

 the four-years' course ; whilst in the continuous-crop experiments, 

 the quantity of nitrogen which was supplied each year amounted 

 to rather more than one-fourth of that applied for four years in 

 the rotation experiments. 



Rotation versus Continuous. 



Average quantities of dry matter per acre in wheat and barley 

 grown in rotation, compared with those grown continuously : 



I shall present also the results from an experiment conducted at 

 the Purdue University Experiment Station, Indiana. The object 



