ILLINOIS FIELD EXPERIMENTS 455 



"Your committee beg leave to submit the following recommendations from 

 the Professor of Agriculture in regard to experiments for the coming season : . . . 



"Fifth. The formal commencement of what is designed to be a long-con- 

 tinued experiment to show the effect of rotation of crops, contrasted with con- 

 tinuous corn-growing, with and without manuring, and also the effect of 

 clover and grass in a rotation. A commencement was made last year, and we 

 are fortunate in having a piece of land more than usually well adapted for such a 

 test. 



" The report was approved, and its recommendation concurred in." 



Thus, these oldest rotation experiments, begun, according to the 

 official records, by Professor George E. Morrow, in 1879, completed 

 a record of thirty-one years in 1909. Fortunately, these plots are 

 located on the typical brown silt loam soil of the corn-belt prairie 

 land. 



In Bulletin 13 of the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, 

 published in 1891 and signed by Professor Morrow, the state- 

 ment is made that from the beginning of these experiments plot 

 No. 3 had " been in corn continuously," that plot No. 4 had 

 been " in com and oats alternately," and that plot No. 5 had 

 " had this rotation: corn, 2 years; oats, i year; meadow (clover, 

 timothy, or both), 3 years." The records also state that these 

 plots had received " no manure or commercial fertilizers of any 

 kind." 



The series originally contained seven other plots, and included a 

 limited use of commercial fertilizers and farm manure, and other 

 rotation systems. All but three of the original plots have been 

 taken for campus or buildings. 



The Experiment Station was established in 1888, and in the re- 

 ports made by Professor Morrow and his assistants relating to 

 these experiments and published in 1888 to 1894 there is no record 

 of crop yields previous to 1888. The most important thing, per- 

 haps, is the record that the crop systems were followed during those 

 early years. 



Since 1888 these crop systems for the three plots mentioned have 

 been essentially maintained, with the modification on plot No. 5 

 during the later years of adopting the more simple rotation of 

 corn, oats, and clover, one each year. From the recorded state- 

 ments and the existing knowledge it is safe to say that all crops 



