ANNUAL REPORT, 1945-46 7 



rakes and the hay was loaded from both the swath and windrow in various in- 

 stances. Buck rakes are most satisfactory on small farms with near-by hay 

 fields and on farms with a small labor force for hay harvesting. 



On many farms the labor-saving possibilities of the pick-up baler for hay have 

 not been developed into an efficient method of hay harvesting. On most farms 

 the bales are dropped on the ground in the field and must be loaded on a wagon 

 or truck by hand. At the barn the bales are unloaded by hand, lifted into the 

 mow and carried to final storage space. This method was costly, inefficient, 

 and fatiguing for these larger farms where field balers were used. 



On one fairly large farm with a 50-cow herd and a total of 75 animal units, the 

 job of harvesting hay was made very efficient and non-fatiguing by using other 

 equipment with the field baler. A one-man baler was used in the field with a 

 low-wheel, rubber-tired wagon attached to the baler so that the bales were loaded 

 directly on the wagon from a ramp built on the baler. A small tractor was used 

 to haul the loaded wagons to the barn where an elevator powered by an electric 

 motor was used to unload bales into the barn. This elevator was mounted on a 

 wagon chassis and could be moved to small doors cut in the side of the barn at 

 25-foot spaces so that bales were carried only a short distance in the barn mow. 

 The haying operation was continuous on this farm since two low wagons were 

 used. One was loaded at the rate of three bales per minute while the other was 

 hauled to the barn, unloaded, and returned to the field in the same length of time. 

 The crew of five men (two in the field, two at the barn, and one hauling) under 

 normal conditions could bale, load, haul, unload, and store a load of 51 bales 

 every 17 minutes. For a continuous operation this amounts to almost one ton 

 of hay per man per hour with a minimum of effort. 



DEPARTMENT OF AGRONOMY 

 Walter S, Eisenmenger in Charge 



Evaluation of Additions of Sodium Nitrate and Ammonium Sulfate when 

 Applied to the Soil during the Late Summer Preceding the Spring when Tobacco 

 Is Planted. (Walter S. Eisenmenger and Karol J. Kucinski.) It has been ob- 

 served that tobacco grown after crops of corn, timothy, or clover frequently did 

 not yield well, probably because of a deficiency of nitrogen at the time when 

 certain organisms were active in decomposing fibrous tissue. Different amounts 

 of nitrogen — 50, 100, 200, 300, and 500 pounds per acre of nitrogen in the form 

 of sodium nitrate or ammonium sulfate — were applied to plots on which corn 

 and grass had previously been grown, for the purpose of ascertaining to what 

 degree this would preveifit the usual bad effects of these crops on the succeed- 

 ing crop of tobacco. The nitrogen was applied sufficiently early in the season 

 to permit the warm weather to facilitate the action of decomposition agencies. 



In general, the yield per acre and the quality of the tobacco increased with 

 each increment of sodium nitrate applied to plots which had had a preceding 

 crop of grass. These increases were larger where calcium carbonate was used as 

 a supplement than where calcium sulfate was so used. Generally the plots on 

 which grass was plowed under were better than the plots from which the grass 

 was harvested as hay before plowing. No definite correlation could be estab- 

 lished on the series of plots which had the calcium sulfate supplement and on 

 which the hay was harvested before plowing. 



No significant relationship was found in the yields or quality of tobacco grown 

 on plots where mature corn had been plowed under in the fall. Both, however, 

 were decidedly lower on the series of plots from which the corn had been harvested 



