98 ANNUAL REPORTS OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



wheat very materially influenced (he yield, especially in a dr}' season. 

 Land disked hut not i)I()wed produced 4] bushels of wheat per acre, 

 while land plowed at the right time, July 15, and at the right depth, 

 7 inches, gave a yield of 38^ bushels. 



New varieties of timothy, originated at the New York Cornell 

 Station, have shown strikingly superior qualities in drought resist- 

 ance. The average yield for 17 new varieties in a dry season was 

 7,153 pounds per acre as compared with 4,091 pounds for seven check 

 plats of ordinary timothy. Corn-breeding work with two different 

 varieties resulted in each instance in a gain of about two weeks in 

 earliness or time of maturing. Oat hybrids and selections made by 

 the station and tested for five seasons have also shown marked im- 

 provement in yielding capacity as compared with common sorts. 



The results of a study of the mineral nutrients in bluegrass by the 

 Ohio Station indicated that some bluegTass pastures in the State 

 contain percentages of the mineral nutrients twice as high as others 

 and that these differences are due to differences in the soils upon 

 which the grasses are grown. It was also found that the content of 

 bluegrass in mineral nutrients may be very greatly increased by the 

 use of fertilizers. 



Work of the Utah Station has shown that Turkey Red wheat is 

 the best yielding Avinter wheat of the State, and that the flour pro- 

 duced from it is of the best and equal in quality to any produced in 

 other parts of the country. The work in dry farming conducted by 

 the station on sagebrush land has shown the practicability of farm- 

 ing these lands under dry-farming methods, and as a consequence 

 the greater portion of the sagebrush areas of the State have been 

 taken up. 



In its work on weed eradication, the Wisconsin Station found that 

 a crop of hemp after cultivated summer fallow was very effective in 

 killing out quackgrass and Canada thistle. 



The plant-breeding and purebred-seed campaign initiated in most 

 instances by the experiment stations is beginning to show notable 

 results from more or less independent efforts. The Wisconsin Ex- 

 periment Association, for instance, with a membership of about 2,000, 

 is reported as selling annually $500,000 worth of purebred seed. 



Working along the lines of animal nutrition, the Illinois Station 

 discovered that within reasonable limits gain in weight in growing 

 animals is not in proportion to the feed consumed, while the Mis- 

 souri Station demonstrated that the practice of maintaining young 

 heifers on a high plane of nutrition does not affect their milking 

 quality, and that the size of the cow may be permanently increased 

 by liberal feeding when young. 



The Wisconsin Station observed that silage, as compared with 

 soiling crops, can be fed with greater advantage to dairy cows during 



