CHAPTER XXII. 

 SOME MINOR CROPS. 



OATS. 



The oat crop is seldom the money crop of the farm. Still it has a great 

 value in the agriculture of all parts of the country, because of its value as a 

 food crop for the farm teams and as a part of a well devised rotation. The 

 oat is a plant better adapted to the conditions of a cool climate than a warm 

 one, and hence the effort to grow oats in the South in the same manner as 

 they are grown in the North generally results in failure, while observance of 

 the needs of the plant would make the crop a success in the South as well as 

 in the North. In all sections south of Washington, the oat crop should be 

 a fall sown crop. It thus makes its growth during the cool season of the 

 year and matures before the summer heat gets excessive, while spring sown 

 oats in the South are checked in their growth by warm weather and fail to de- 

 velop properly, making a light and chaffy grain. Long culture in this way, 

 and "the survival of the fittest" have developed varieties of a more hardy 

 nature, and better able to withstand the winter cold than the varieties com- 

 monly sown in spring in the North. Such is the hardiness of these varieties 

 that many Northern farmers have of late years found that the Southern win- 

 ter oats are better for their early sowing in the spring. Some time since a 

 reader of one of the leading agricultural papers asked the editor for informa- 

 tion in regard to winter oats. He replied that there were no such things as 

 winter oats, and that the so-called winter oats were simply the common oats 

 sown in the South in the fall. If that editor were to come into the Upper 

 South and sow in the fall the same oats that the Northern farmers are sowing 

 in the spring, he would soon find that there is some difference, for his North- 

 ern spring oats would be destroyed by a freeze that would not check the 

 Southern varieties. Some years ago a friend of ours in Southern Virginia 

 came to the same conclusion, and in the fall, instead of sowing the usual 

 Virginia winter turf oats, he sowed some oats that he had bought from the 



(185) 



