BULLETIN 140 FEBRUARY, 1905 



Ontario Agricultural College and Experimental Farm 



THE RESULTS OF FIELD EXPERIMENTS WITH 

 FARM CROPS— 1904. 



By C. a. Zavitz, Professor of Field Husbandry. 



The work in the Experimental Department consists in planning 

 the various experiments ; laying out, seeding, and looking after the 

 field plots; harvesting, threshing, weighing, and testing the grain; 

 taking up, weighing, counting, testing and storing the potatoes and 

 roots ; cutting, weighing, and harvesting the grass, corn, and fodder 

 crops, etc., and also in picking by hand the samples of grain grown on 

 the plots, some to be sown on the plots the following year, and some to 

 be distributed for co-operative experimental work throughout Ontario. 

 But few people realize what a large amount of very careful thought is 

 required in planning, supervising, and examining these plots, and in 

 studying, comparing, and summarizing the results for presentation in 

 reports, bulletins, newspaper articles, and lectures. 



Experimental Grounds. About fifty acres of land, divided into 

 about 2,ooo plots, are used for agricultural field experiments, conducted 

 with varieties of grain, root, tuber, grass, clover, fodder, silage, and 

 miscellaneous crops ; with artificial, green, and farmyard manures ; 

 witl^wnethods of cultivation, selection of seed, dates of seeding, etc. — 

 all With the greatest care, and for several years in succession — in order 

 to secure strictly accurate and reliable results. These experiments 

 deal with the crops grown on over nine-tenths of the cultivated land in 

 Ontario, that is, fully 10,000,000 acres. 



Experimental Plots. The experimental grounds have a gentle 

 slope towards the southwest, and the soil is what might be termed an 

 average clay loam. Nearly one-quarter of the land is manured each 

 year with twenty tons (about twelve loads) of farmyard manure per 

 acre. It will thus be seen that the most of the land receives farmyard 

 manure once every four years. No commercial fertilizers are used ex- 

 cept in distinct fertilizer experiments, which occupy from two to three 

 acres each year, and on which tests are made to ascertain the compara- 

 tive value of different fertilizers with different crops. The plots vary 

 in size according to the requirements of the different experiments, and 

 the yields per acre are determined from the actual yields of the plots in 

 every instance. 



Results of Experiments. 



All our field experiments are conducted for at least five years be- 

 fore any of them are dropped. For the results of many of the tests 



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