116 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



plots laid out and under-drained by Director Eugene Davenport, now 

 of Illinois. This work will furnish nothing for publication until 1905. 

 Adjacent plots are treated with different rotations or with different com- 

 binations of commercial fertilizers. Plot one, for instance, has borne 

 wheat and clover alternately for a long series of years and will continue 

 to do so until 1905. The adjacent plot bears the rotation wheat, clover, 

 potatoes, still another i)lot a four-year rotation, another has twenty loads 

 of barnyard manure to the acre each year, the next an equivalent of this 

 manure in commercial fertilizers. In 1905 the whole area will be planted 

 to corn, the next year sown to oats, the next to wheat and the next to 

 clover to test the final effect of the treatment on the productivity of 

 the soil. 



Concerning the use of vetches for any purpose upon the Michigan 

 farm something ought to be said in regard to the danger of this legume 

 becoming a bad weed. This much is true, wherever vetches have been 

 sown on the station plots there have appeared occasional plants which 

 have presented in due time their beautiful blue flowers and, unless they 

 are harvested before the formation of the vetch seed, the latter becomes 

 an integral part of the harvest, carrying forward the vetch as a weed 

 into the next crop to be grown from the given seed. In wheat it has 

 proven on the farm, as it has on the area east of. Howard City, a bad 

 and really dangerous weed. The vetch seed is about the same size as a 

 kernel of wheat and has about the same specific gravity, rendering it 

 quite impossible to either screen out or winnow out the vetch seed from 

 the seed wheat. As a result, the station has to be at a considerable 

 expense each year in the removal of the growing vetch from the crops. 



Prof. Longyear, the botanist of the station, made a careful botanical 

 study of the vetch resulting in the outline of a key, by the use of which 

 the farmer, although ignorant of botany, may be able to tell to which 

 class a given sample belongs. This is a matter of prime importance, 

 because under the name of hairy vetch there are sold by the seedsmen 

 a great variety of vetches, some utterly worthless and some very useful. 



The beginning of the selection and breeding of corn for higher content 

 of protein was made in the period covered by this report. The introduc- 

 tion of varieties from Illinois or further south proved as^ was to be ex- 

 pected, entirely abortive of results. The corn did not mature sufficiently 

 to perpetuate itself and where, in one or two cases, it did mature enough 

 to form kernels that would germinate the effect of the change of climate 

 on per cent of protein was sufficiently great to render the further work 

 with the foreign varieties nugatory. Michigan grown seed was selected 

 and from the results of the chemical selection those ears containing the 

 highest protein in the spring of 1904 were used for seed that spring. By 

 combining the physical appearance of the ear, its cylindrical form well 

 filled out at butt and tip, with the results of chemical analysis, we hope 

 to increase the per cent of protein in the corn without lessening the yield 

 per acre. No revolution will be attempted but a gradual evolution of 

 better strains of well known varieties. The advice so often given farm- 

 ers to change their seed with no definite object in view is entirely wrong. 

 The hope of the Michigan farmer in the matter of corn ia to evolve better 

 strains of existing varieties rather thiln to introduce a radically superior 

 variety from some distant source. 



