CORN AND ITS CULTIVATION. 



203 



The rule with a majority of farmers is 

 to cultivate four times and quit. One 

 good rain after corn is "laid by," if fol- 

 lowed by dry weather, will do more harm 

 to the crop, on a fine-textured soil, than if 

 no rain at all had fallen after the last 

 cultivation. The plant needs its greatest 

 supply of moisture at the time of bloom- 

 ing, and to insure favorable conditions 

 shallow cultivation, with single-horse, five- 

 or 12-tooth cultivators, or an "A" har- 

 row, is essential till the crop is practically 

 made. Late cultivation makes a fine seed 

 bed for winter wheat to follow corn, and 

 take up the nitrogen made available too 

 late in the season to be taken by the corn 

 plant and in danger of being wasted. If 

 a wheat crop is not desired, sow rye for 

 this purpose, and plow under in the 

 spring. 



Figure 2 shows the root of a corn plant 

 uncovered in 1895 on Scott Kelsey's farm, 

 in the Kaw valley, Kansas, just east of 

 Topeka, grown in the track of a tree-dig- 

 ger that, in taking up nursery stock in the 

 fall of 1894, had pulverized the soil 18 

 inches deep and 20 inches wide. The 

 track of the tree-digger in its width and 

 depth was a mass of fibrous roots. In the 

 zone between the tree-digger furrows, 

 where the ground was hard, there were 

 few fibrous roots, and a limited number of 

 large, smooth roots. This field yielded 84 

 bushels per acre in the season of 1895. 

 The subsoil roots were followed 4J feet 

 down, but the ends were not found. By 

 way of contrast, see Fig. 3, on upland, four 

 miles north of Topeka, never plowed over 

 six inches deep. All the fibrous roots 

 (food gatherers) were found in the lower 

 two inches of the cultivated soil. A culti- 

 vator tooth running four inches deep would 

 leave only two inches in depth of culti- 

 vated soil for the food gatherers to work in 

 between the rows entirely too limited an 

 area to secure good results. The root de- 

 velopment was small, and only two joints 

 were covered sufficiently to send down 

 subsoil roots. The yield was under 40 

 bushels per acre. 



As corn roots use the water in the soil 

 to a depth of five feet at least, this would 

 give 25 cubic feet of soil for each plant to 

 root in, and, when fairly moist, would con- 

 tain about 20 gallons of water, available 

 for the use of the plant. This would be 

 more than two- thirds of the quantity need- 

 ed to make a 60-bushel-per-acre crop, and 



