No. 5. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 379 



freeze, while others cannot endure cool nights, the plant juices of 

 which congeal and are permanently injured by the lightest frost. 

 All the varieties of wheat, winter and spring rye, oats, barley, spelts, 

 are cool weather cereals, while all the varieties of corn and the sorg- 

 hum are hot weather cereals. Red alsike, crimson, sweet, white and 

 numerous other clovers, together with some varieties of alfalfa, 

 Canada field peas and a large variety of other peas, and some beans, 

 are cool weather legumes, while mammoth clover, some varieties of 

 alfalfa, the various varieties of co^v^eas, soy or soja beans, belong to 

 the warm and hot weather legumes. In many of the sections re- 

 ferred to both the cool and hot weather cereals and the cool and hot 

 weather legumes are indiscriminately raised. 



As previously stated, plant growth is a process of a storing sun- 

 light and the farmer, therefore, through the agencies of the plants he 

 raises, is a storer up of sunlight in such a condition that it will 

 furnish the largest amount of the most available human nutrition; 

 and the question will ere long be. What plants will furnish the 

 highly available human nutrition in the largest quantity under the 

 varied climatic and soil conditions. Wheat and corn are first among 

 the cereal grains as gatherers and storers of large amount of avail- 

 able human nutrition containing, especially wheat, all the elements 

 of nourishment required by the human body, the former a cool 

 weather crop which .starts its growth in the fall of the year at a 

 season when corn will no longer grow, and starts in the spring, weeks 

 and sometimes months before corn is planted, in fact develops and 

 ripens a crop by the time corn gets w^ell started. A climate in which 

 the temperature during the season of stalk and grain development 

 ranges from 6.5 degress — 80 degrees Fahrenheit, with an amount of 

 moisture that will produce not a luxuriant, weak, sappy stalk but a 

 stiff stemmed, strong one is the most favorable for the production 

 of large yields of high milling quality wheat which will make a large 

 quantity of flour of a fine bread making character, while the tempera- 

 ture most favorable for the development of a stalk that will produce 

 and ripen the largest yields of corn, ranges from 80 degrees to 98 de- 

 grees Fahrenheit during the greater parts of the months of the 

 middle of .June, July and August, with a rainfall of from six to eight 

 inches during this period, is the most favorable for the production of 

 large yields of high feeding quality of corn. The luxuriant growth 

 of stalk in which too much energy is put into straw and not enough 

 into grain is usually due to too much rain and sunshine, or at any 

 rate, too much moisture and a temperature at which stalk growth 

 can go on, which is the case in the higher elevations of Somerset 

 county, with favorable cool climate but with an excessive rainfall 

 reaching .5.5 inches during the year because of which the rain accom- 

 plishes what the heat and moisture do in other sections. 



But soil conditions favorable for the production of a superior 

 wheat are equally as important as climatic. The warm early farm- 

 ings, sandy loams and loamy soils derived from the Potsdam sand 

 and micaceous rock of the South Mountains also produce large yields 

 of high milling quality' wheat, because these soils are warm with no 

 excess of rainfall and not an excessive water holding capacity. 

 Plant growth begins early and the wheat jilant is grown and the 

 grain developed during the cooler days of early June and ripened 

 during the middle of this month, while in the cooler loams, clay 



