186 NORTHEAST EXPERIMENT FARM. 

Oat Field.—View from House. 
bushels while an old field of similar soil yielded 30.8 bushels 
per acre. It must not be supposed from this, that the fer- 
tility of the old fields can not be maintained—but it is true 
that under a careless system of cropping they will degenerate, 
as will any soil where sand is a conspicuous element. This 
same old field, which has been in cultivation since ’93, gave 
a larger yield of oats in 1902 than at any previous time. 
But it has been in a three year rotation of oats, clover and 
corn fodder. In ’96 the field yielded 36.5 bushels, in ’99, 
30.8 bushels, and in 1902 it gave 39.0 bushels per acre. 
In 1900, much of the crop was a failure, the drought so 
affecting it in the early spring and summer that it produced 
a very thin stand and short straw. In this season there 
was astriking difference in the yield of different fields, rang- 
ing from 10 to 40 bushels per acre. After analyzing the pos- 
sible causes, it became evident that treatment of the soil, or 
other superficial causes, did not affect the result in this sea- 
son, so much as the natural texture of the subsoil. Those 
fields which yielded well were in each case underlaid with 
