WHERE WINTER WHEAT is THE MONEY CROP 121 



tion the wheat crop had steadily improved, and he said that now his last crop 

 was 40 bushels per acre. I have seen, the present Summer, lands in Mary- 

 land on which 50 bushels of wheat per acre were grown the present season, 

 where no nitrogen has been bought for many years. 



The wheat farmers of Maryland have learned that they can get all the 

 nitrogen they need without buying it in the form of a commercial fertilizer. 

 And this is a lesson for wheat farmers in all parts of the country where winter 

 wheat is grown. The important thing to the wheat grower is, while getting 

 a fair growth of straw to avoid an excessive growth, but at the same time a 

 full crop of grain. An excess of nitrogen tends to an excessive straw growth 

 and a consequent weakness and liability to lodge. 



While all the studies of the manurial requirements of the wheat crop 

 show that the greatest yield is where there is applied a complete fertilizer, 

 with a due proportion of phosphoric acid and nitrogen and potash, it by no 

 means follows that it is necessary to buy all of these in a fertilizer. We 

 should also bear in mind the fact, that on a soil where legumes have not been 

 regularly grown in a rotation, some years must elapse before the nitrogen col- 

 lecting crop will gather more than is needed by the immediately succeeding 

 crop, unless further addition of nitrifying organic matter is, in the mean 

 time, added to the soil. Hence a short rotation again comes in as the best 

 under most conditions. 



ROTATIONS FOR THE WINTER WHEAT CROP. 



For many years, and long before the use of commercial fertilizers became 

 general, the best farmers of the Middle Atlantic States, whose money crop is 

 wheat with stock feeding, practiced a rotation in which the land was seeded 

 to clover and grass with the wheat, mowed for several years and then 

 pastured, and finally the sod plowed for corn, which was followed by oats the 

 following Spring and the oats stubble fallowed and prepared for wheat again. 

 Keeping a large number of cattle and raising a goodly quantity of manure, 

 these farmers managed to keep their lands to a fair state of productiveness, 

 with a long rotation, on farms divided up into very small fields with a vast 

 amount of needless fencing. This practice has since gradually given way to 

 a four year rotation, with clover standing but one year, and the land again 

 returned to corn. The fault of this rotation is that the important money 

 crop, the wheat, comes on the oats stubble, and nearly two years after the 

 clover has been plowed under, hence does not get the best use of the clover. 

 The Delaware Station proposes to remedy this by introducing there the early 

 varieties of the Southern cow pea, after the oats are cut, as a preparatory 



