Progressive Agriculture 79 



Cut No. 36 also bears out the same point re- 

 garding the question of increased fertility by 

 tillage. Here are shown two stools of wheat pulled 

 the eighteenth day of November, 1910> at Hold- 

 rege, Nebraska from two adjoining fields, one 

 from the C. B. & Q. farm, the other from a field 

 immediately west of it. Both were seeded about 

 the tenth of September; one, however, was sum- 

 mer tilled land, the other was land that had grown 

 a crop in 1910, then plowed and fitted for crop 

 again, and work well done by a good farmer. 

 About the twentieth of September, ten days after 

 seeding, a very good rain fell, about If inches. 

 The larger stool which is from the summer tilled 

 field is not exceptionally large, but a fair average 

 sample and contains eighty-three well developed 

 stools, or stalks, while the smaller stool contains 

 only six stalks, and it would have been difficult 

 to have obtained a larger stool in this field ; it was 

 above the average. 



While it is fair to concede that the seed and root 

 bed in the summer tilled field was finer and firmer, 

 and carried at the start more moisture in the top 

 six to eight inches all of which was more favorable 

 to the rapid growth and development of the roots, 

 yet after the rain the twentieth of September, the 

 conditions regarding the firmness of the seed bed 

 and available moisture would have been nearly 

 alike in both fields because of the dissolving and 

 settling effect of the heavy rain on the late fitted 

 field and practically all the rain must have soaked 

 in. Think of fully fourteen times as great a 

 growth in the same time, a large per cent of which 



