80 FORAGE PLANTS AND THEIR CULTURE 



on the conditions of the season or of the locality in which 

 the seed was grown, and with the amount of chaff or other 

 impurities which it may contain. In most states a legal 

 weight to the bushel has been established for each im- 

 portant kind of seed. 



The influence of weight of seed upon resultant yields 

 is still an open question. With cereals where the same 

 volume of heavy, light and unseparated seeds have been 

 sown, the resulting differences obtained have usually been 

 too small to be significant. 



Few experiments of this sort have been carried out with 

 grasses or clovers. Hunt secured better yields of timothy 

 at the Cornell Experiment Station with heavy seed, both 

 when the same weight and the same number of seeds were 

 sown. At the Utah Experiment Station heavy and light 

 timothy seeds were separated by means of a salt solution, 

 but no difference was obtained in the yield of plots 

 planted to each. 



74. Number of seeds in one pound. The number of 

 seeds in one pound of different kinds of field seeds has been 

 determined by several investigators. The figures of dif- 

 ferent authorities often show wide variation for the same 

 kind of seed. This may be due in part to the quality of 

 the seed used, as the weight of a bushel from different 

 sources or in different seasons may vary greatly. The 

 subject is not one of much agronomic value, and mainly 

 on this account has received but little attention. In some 

 crops like the cowpea, soybean and field pea, the size of 

 the seeds and the number in a pound vary greatly accord- 

 ing to variety. In this case it is often preferable to use 

 the small-seeded varieties for forage production, as less 

 seed is required to the acre, and the price of the small- 

 seeded sorts is usually just as cheap. 



