670 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



wide spread, the conditions in which, many of them occur are such that 

 we, as the farming community, can only regard their complete extermina- 

 tion as beyond the limit of probability, if not of possibility. It might be 

 said that if taken when they commence it would not be difficult to eradi- 

 cate them. For an instance, if the farmer on whose land the first Russian 

 thistle grew in 1873 had known the evil character of the plant, and had 

 spent a few hours to kill them in his flax field, it might easily have been 

 destroyed in this county and millions of dollars and years of labor saved. 

 This emphasizes the need that each land owner should be on the watch 

 for new plants and learn their character if possible, before they become 

 established and become an aggressive invasion on his domains. 



There is another point that we as farmers should carefully bear in 

 mind, which is, that if we do not interest ourselves and strongly support 

 and enforce our laws for the extermination of weeds, those laws will be 

 of little avail, in fact become but a dead letter on our statute books. 



That we can ever expect the complete eradication of all weeds on our 

 farm I do not even hope or claim, but if this suggestion can approach so 

 near that point as to prevent \ery material damage without requiring too 

 great extra labor in conducting our farm operations, this would be my 

 ideal condition for a farm so far as weeds are concerned. But as you all 

 know there are all gradations from this condition to that of the farm so 

 yery weedy that a profitable crop cannot be raised upon it; that is to say, 

 that to raise a good crop upon it requires so great an amount of expense 

 and labor that it creases to be a profitable crop. A large portion of our 

 weeds here are annuals and may be brought under subjection by prevent- 

 ing seedage, but the seed of many of these retain their vitality many years, 

 and when once plentiful in the soil they keep germinating from year to 

 year when by the shifting of the soil by the various ways of soil prepara- 

 tion for crops they are brought under the proper conditions of plant 

 growth. Instances of this delayed germination you are all familiar with 

 as in the case of such weeds as the cocklebur and in the clovers, etc. 

 None of these seeds will germinate to any great extent more than six 

 Inches deep. Some of the most troublesome annuals we have to contend 

 with are cockleburs, velvet button, the various forms of smartwced and 

 foxtail or pigeon grass in cultivated lands, and in meadows and pastures 

 the rag weed, dog fennel, horse weed or colt tail and two new ones that 

 are rapidly coming to the front as obnoxious weeds, are the prickly lettuce 

 and squirrel tail or wild barley, Hordemn pumatim. The latter is not 

 troublesome in cultivated fields, but the prickly lettuce is doubtless going 

 to be troublesome in the fields and in the pastures, the garden and the 

 orchards, in fact everywhere, even clover at its best cannot smother it. 

 It is a very recent arrival here though it has been in the United States 

 (Massachusetts) since late in the 60's. As giving you a slight idea of its 

 powers of propagation a single average plant has been estimated to bear 

 8,000 seeds, which have wings capable of carrying them with the aid of 

 the winds, long distances, and I want to impress it upon your minds that 

 these seeds do not have to be kiln dried like our seed corn to grow. The 

 squurel tail is most troublesome in pastures and meadows and its most 



