110 HATCH EXPERIMENT STATION. [Jan. 



EEPORT OF THE AGRICULTURISTS. 



WM. P. brooks; assistant, f. r. church. 



The agricultural department during the past season has 

 followed up the main lines of inquiry pertaining to the selec- 

 tion of manures and fertilizers for the various crops of the 

 field and garden previously undertaken. It is recognized 

 that the inevitable variations due to seasonal and other con- 

 ditions beyond control make necessary numerous repetitions 

 of an experiment before results justify general conclusions. 

 It is comparatively easy, for example, to determine whether 

 a given fertilizer is useful to a given crop upon a given field 

 in any one year. One is not, therefore, justified in conclud- 

 ing that it will prove useful every year ; one does not knoAV 

 that it will prove useful in other combinations of fertilizer 

 materials, nor even that its continued use may not ultimately 

 prove harmful in certain directions. 



Results must be tested by experiments again and again, 

 and yet again, before the conditions affecting them can be 

 estimated at their true value, safe deductions drawn there- 

 from that will be generally useful, or advice founded upon 

 them. The past season, so exceptional in character, aft'ords 

 striking illustration of the necessity of such repetition in the 

 nature of the results from the use of a number of materials 

 which it was believed we quite fully understood. As a 

 means of testing the results in plot experiments in the open 

 field, where numerous conditions are beyond control, we 

 have the past season continued the system of closed plot and 

 vegetation experiments . 



We have begun a series of experiments with asparagus, 

 for which we have been making pre})aration for the past two 

 years, having laid out forty-two plots for that pur})ose, with 



